


Things Fall Apart

by ChaneenW



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode: s10e01 My Struggle, F/M, Pre-X-Files Revival, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:27:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 60,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7309474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaneenW/pseuds/ChaneenW
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at the cyclical nature of Mulder and Scully's relationship in the three years leading up to the Revival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks always to my faithful reader, CaroBertaud.

 December 2012 (Prologue)

 

But nothing happened. And that’s probably the worst thing that could have happened to us: nothing. If the end of the world had actually come to pass, there would have at least been something to do, to fight against. Without a purpose, we unraveled. I guess there were important questions we hadn’t been facing all of those years as we discussed super soldiers, government conspiracies, and alien colonization: why did we need these things in our lives to make sense of ourselves? Why would we need the world to fall apart to be able to find each other?

 

 

February 2013

 

“Bye, Mulder!” Scully’s voice floated across the house as she stood in the doorway. Although I was in my office with the door closed, I could imagine her in a perfectly-pressed blouse and blazer with a pencil-line skirt and heels. I had no way of knowing, but I pictured her wearing a gray suit to match my own mood. She would be holding a travel mug of coffee in one hand with her other on the doorknob, waiting for me to acknowledge that she was leaving.

“Have a nice day,” I mumbled in reply. As soon as I heard the door shut, I reached over to grab one of the many binders that littered my desk and sighed. Another day. It was now two months past the date the Mayans had predicted as the end of the world, and not for the first time in my life, I was finding it hard to reconcile the fact that I was alive.

For the past four years, ever since the FBI had absolved me of the crime of murder and I felt safer to resume my work, I had been filling those binders with everything I could get my hands on that was related to the Mayan prophecies, the super soldier alien hybrids, and of course, the impending colonization. But now I had to find other ways to fill my time, find other ways to keep my mind busy. It was, I admitted, overwhelming to figure out a new direction for my life. At least if the world had ended, I would be released from the responsibility of saving the world, released from the responsibility of living itself.

I automatically stopped those thoughts as soon as they brushed through my mind. Doctor Scully wouldn’t approve, I knew. At the thought of Scully, I let out an involuntary groan, remembering that she was working at least sixteen hours at the hospital today, maybe twenty-four. At least she had found a real purpose in her life, one that couldn’t be snuffed out just because the alien takeover had turned out to be a hoax. I was proud of her, sure, but it was still awfully lonely in my office all day, and it had only become lonelier still during these last couple months.

I flipped open the binder, shut it again, and then tossed it gently across my desk. My thoughts slid back to the night it was all supposed to happen, back in December. As the clock had ticked closer to midnight, Scully and I had sat on the porch, huddled under a blanket, where we’d held each other, waiting. She hadn’t been completely convinced that anything was going to happen, but I was a bit exhilarated as I wondered what the end would feel like. Would the world end in fire or ice or alien invasion? I hadn’t been able to uncover anything that would have allowed me to stop it, one way or another. The super soldiers seemed to have gone underground, or hell, they might have flown away to their alien planet. Whatever had happened, they vanished as surely as the Mayans themselves had.

But in those last moments (or what I had assumed were our last moments) things had been felt normal again between Scully and me. Her arms had wrapped around me and I had stroked her hair, and it seemed like the last few years that we had been working together as unofficial partners had brought us together again, if only for the end. But once it became clear that nothing was, in fact, occurring, the spell was broken. We reverted immediately back into the patterns we had established for ourselves, acting like planets that orbit around each other but never come into contact because of universal laws that can never be broken.

And now I was left to sit here day after day, feeling increasingly stupid that I had believed the Smoking Man when I should have known the devil to be a liar.

 

*****

 

I heard the key turn in the lock and raised my head off the pillow to glance at the time. 6:20AM. Scully would be tired, so I forced myself to get up and pull on some clothes. I walked through the house to the kitchen where she stood at the counter, reading through the mail. “Bed’s all ready for you, Doc,” I said casually, as if it were perfectly normal for a couple living in the same house to share a bed yet not really share it.

She looked up and me with a tired smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. I wondered briefly if that was because of me or if she’d just had a rough day at work. She moved as if she were going to leave the kitchen but then turned back around suddenly. “Mulder,” she said, and as always, my name sounded like music on her lips. I looked at her intently to let her know she had my full attention. It seemed as though she had something to say, but after a moment she dropped her eyes and asked, “How was your day?”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear. Did she want to know that while I ran my requisite ten miles it really felt like I was running away? Did she want to know that I had stared at my computer screen for three hours before finding the will to actually turn it on? “It was fine,” I said at last.

That seemed to satisfy her, and she walked to the bedroom to sleep off whatever it was that she hadn’t wanted to tell me. I laced up my sneakers and prepared for a run.

 

*****

 

Nine hours later, I heard the shower turn on, and I made an impulsive decision to start dinner. I figured it might help her open up to tell me whatever was on her mind. Over the years, I hadn’t become quite as good of a cook as Scully, but I could make some pretty good chicken dishes. She had been a good teacher, very patient as I ruined a lot of dinners that she gamely ate anyway. I pushed away those memories as I carefully constructed a more than passable meal. This time, there would be no disaster, nor any good-natured laughter at my failure.

Scully entered the dining room an hour later just as I was placing the chicken casserole and green beans on the table. Now she gave me a real smile, a grateful smile. We sat down to eat together, at first in a companionable silence. Then Scully said simply, “I was offered a job at a hospital in Seattle.”

The chicken suddenly turned to sawdust in my mouth. “I—wha—Seattle?” I spluttered after a moment.

She was calm. “I sent in my résumé and a few letters of recommendation about three weeks ago. It’s for a senior surgical position, which I’m not really qualified for, so I was almost sure I wouldn’t get it.”

“But you didn’t tell me that you were looking for a new job,” I said, hating the desperation in my voice.

“No. Like I said, it was a long shot. But they were really excited about my work when I talked to them during the phone interview. I’m thinking about taking it,” she said as she spooned more green beans on to her plate.

A thousand questions flew into my mind, none of which I felt I could ask Scully. Was she leaving me? Did she want me to come too? Was I allowed to have a say in this? Would we be selling the house? As always, she read my mind and said slowly, “This isn’t a decision I’m making lightly, Mulder. I know that taking the job in Seattle would mean a lot of changes. For both of us.”

“I know,” I said and left it at that. I didn’t want to have the conversation that ended with her packing her bags and moving across the country without me. I had to admit that we had been edging toward this moment for years, but I had still clung to the idea that it was always somewhere off in the future. Well, the future was apparently today.

We absurdly continued eating in silence after that as if a bomb hadn’t just exploded in the middle of the table. After we finished and cleared the table, we moved into the living room and I flipped on the TV to a random basketball game. Scully was perched on the edge of the other side of the couch reading, but after a few moments, she put her book down and said, “Mulder.”

I sighed and turned off the TV. “What?”

“What do _you_ want to do?”

“What do you mean?” I asked warily.

“Well, obviously your work—our work—has revealed that there is no more imminent threat to us or to the rest of the world. Cancer Man is dead, the super soldiers are gone, and nobody has tried to kill us in a very long time. What will you focus on after I’m gone?”

So she was planning to leave me, after all. Until that moment, I hadn’t known how fervently I had been hoping that somehow this could be a new chance for us, a new location in the dense green forests of the Pacific Northwest where we could possibly start over and save our relationship. But she wanted to do this by herself. It really shouldn’t have come as a shock to me. We had been dying by degrees for a long time.

“Worried about how I’ll support myself once you move across the country, Doctor Scully?” I asked bitterly. At the look on her face, I immediately wished I could take it back. She _had_ been worried about me. She always worried about me.

“Scully, I—“

“Mulder, listen,” she said wearily. “For the last few years, I’ve devoted what little spare time I had to helping you find your answers. I helped you not only because I’ve always believed in you but because I know that searching for answers is your way of making sense of the world. But it’s over now, and you’ve got to let it go. You should try to find something that gets you out of the house and allows you to fulfill your life’s purpose in some other more mundane way.”

“The way you have, you mean.”

“Yes, the way most people do.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and she didn’t press any further. Picking up her book, she pretended to read for several minutes without turning a single page, and I pretended not to notice. Finally, without looking up from her book, she asked, “Are you happy?” Her voice quivered on the last syllable.

I knew she wanted me to admit that I wasn’t so I could justify her decision to go. But I’d long learned not to measure my life in terms of the happiness I could expect to achieve. It was different for her, though, I knew. She still believed that we could somehow outrun our monsters.

The growing silence between us answered her question, and her eyes filled with tears, making them even more beautiful if that were possible. “Why are we doing this?” she whispered, turning her head away so I was left to guess whether tears had spilled over on to her cheeks.

There was only one reason I could think of, but it wasn’t enough to tell her now, not after she’d decided to leave. I’d have to find a way to show her. To remind her. After a few moments of awkwardness, I stood up. “Well, I think I’ll head to bed now,” I said, turning to leave. “Good night, Scully.” She nodded without looking at me. Neither one of us pointed out the fact that it was only 7:00PM.


	2. Chapter 2

February 2013

 

As soon as Mulder left the living room, I felt the tension I had been holding in my shoulders instantly release. I wasn’t even slightly apologetic about my feelings of relief at having the whole night to myself without Mulder hanging around, in fact, it was the best thing about getting off work in the morning. For the last two months, I felt like I had been tiptoeing around, trying not to disturb our uncertain peace. I still wasn’t sure if I should push him further or back off and let him work through whatever demons were plaguing his mind. I wished we could have a real conversation, but whenever I tried, the coldness, the blankness in his eyes made me recoil. He had built a wall between us that I had not yet figured out how to scale.

Thankfully, my cell phone interrupted my thoughts.

“Hello, Dana,” said my mother. “I saw that you called earlier. Is there anything wrong?”

I inwardly groaned. I had forgotten that I’d called her when I first found out about the job offer. It was the last thing I wanted to talk about right now. “No, Mom. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? How’s Fox?” I sighed as she listed the second topic I wanted to avoid.

“He’s fine too,” I said as casually as I could. Clearly, though, I was not a good liar.

“Are things any better than they were the last time we talked?” she asked gently. I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d last said to my mother about Mulder, but the specifics didn’t really matter anyway. Things had not been good for a long time, and my mother knew it. My mind drifted back to Christmas, the last time that we had all gotten together. It had been right after the alien invasion that wasn’t, and Mulder had been in a terrible mood. Not a fan of Christmas during the best of times, this year he had been especially broody and distant. I was only glad that Bill hadn’t been there to antagonize the situation further. “Dana?” my mother’s voice pulled me out of my reverie.

I decided to get right to the point to avoid having to talk about Mulder. “I was offered a senior surgical position in Seattle today,” I announced with fake enthusiasm.

My mother paused. “What does Fox think about that?”

Damn. “What, no congratulations?” I tried to make my voice light. “This would be huge promotion for me.”

“You’re right, honey. Congratulations, that’s wonderful. Are you going to take it?”

“I was thinking about it, yes. I have to let them know for sure by Monday, and then I would start two weeks after that.”

“That only gives you four days to make a pretty big decision,” my mother observed. “If you accept the position, will Fox move out there with you?”

I was getting annoyed by her probing. I had always respected the fact that she chose not to tell me about the events leading up to her estrangement with my younger brother, Charlie, and I had never forced her to discuss it. Why couldn’t she do the same for me? “No, he wouldn’t be moving with me,” I said, my voice clipped and distant. She didn’t take the hint.

“But what about his depression?” My mom asked, and I could only sigh as the dream of a new life drifted away like a breeze.

Of course I wasn’t serious about moving 3,000 miles away from Mulder, no matter the current state of our relationship. As his physician, I acknowledged that I had a responsibility towards him. And sure, I could have transferred his care, but I was the one who had first diagnosed his depression, after which I had then encouraged him to seek out a specialist. He had not, of course, because he was stubborn and because he thought he was fine, just in a slump. I, well aware of the signs, knew that it was more than that; it was clinical depression, exacerbated by the trauma he had experienced and had not yet properly addressed.

“It’s not getting better,” I whispered, defeated.

My mother’s voice was instantly as soothing as honey. “It’s not your fault, Dana. Depression is an actual illness; you know that.”

“It’s just so difficult to look at him and not see the man that I love looking back at me.” I thought of the empty look in his eyes just this morning, and I shivered. “I know I can’t move to Seattle. I just…I just wanted a change, I guess.”

“He’s still the same person. Things have been difficult for him,” she reminded me, as if I didn’t know. As if I could ever forget. “And I have to say for selfish reasons that I’m glad that you’re not moving out there, even though it would have been a good opportunity for you. Are there any local positions available that would give you more of a challenge?”

My mother knew me too well. The Seattle position hadn’t been about escaping Mulder, not really. For a long time, longer than I wanted to admit, I’d felt restless. When I had first taken the position at Our Lady of Sorrows in 2007, directly following my surgical residency, I’d felt like I had a chance to do something important and fulfilling. I hadn’t felt like that in a long time though. Unwilling to think about that further, I said goodbye to my mother with promises to call again soon.

After I ended the call, though, those thoughts continued to torment me. What was my problem? What did I want to do? Why did contentment always seem so out of reach?

 

*****

 

A couple of days later, I was returning home from a particularly grueling twenty-four hour shift. It was after 10PM, so it didn’t strike me as odd at first that all of the lights were out. Usually Mulder left the porch light on for me when he knew I was coming home after dark, but he sometimes forgot. Walking into the living room, however, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t sprawled out on the couch. Was he even here?

Then, realizing what must have happened, I became exasperated. He must have forgotten that I would be coming home at night this time instead of the morning and had gone to the bedroom to sleep. Great, after twenty-four hours at the hospital, I would have to crash on the couch.

Rolling my eyes, I made my way to the kitchen where I stopped short. The overhead lights were off, but the room was illuminated by two flashlights that had been set upright on the table so that their lights reflected off of the ceiling. Mulder, who had been sitting at the table, rose and gave me a shy smile when I walked in. “No candles,” he said apologetically, gesturing to the flashlights. “I had to improvise. Happy birthday, Scully.” He held out a wrapped gift.

I continued to stand there, confused. “What?” I quickly thought about what day it was and realized that it was, indeed, February 23rd. It had been such a busy week that I had completely forgotten my own birthday, yet Mulder of all people had not. “What?” I asked again. After everything that had happened this week, this was the last thing I would have expected him to do. Mulder laughed gently and pressed the package into my hands.

I carefully peeled back the wrapping paper and lifted out a blue oversized shirt that said “Virginia is for Lovers” with a heart filling in for the “o”. It was such a typical Mulder gift that I couldn’t help but smile as I lifted my eyes to his. They were once again the eyes I had fallen in love with: earnest, kind, and unguarded and I could have almost cried with relief. For whatever reason, my Mulder had come back to me.

I leaned into his chest and he wrapped his arms around me. “Don’t go,” he murmured into my hair. I answered by reaching my hands up to his neck and kissing his forehead. We stayed like that for a long time, just listening to each other breathe. Everything was perfect, right here in this moment. But in spite of it all, my insecurities swelled to the surface. How many times had we been here before? How many times over the past ten years had we started over, just like this?

“Is it always going to be this difficult?” I whispered.

He took a moment to answer, and when he did, his voice was thick with emotion. “Maybe,” he admitted. “But I’ll always keep trying, Scully. If you promise to try, too.”

“I do,” I promised. But my voice was tinged with apprehension, and I knew that Mulder could hear it too. He pulled me closer to his chest in a reassuring hug.

“I’ll never give up,” he vowed.

I looked up at him with a wistful smile and said, “Please don’t ever forget you said that.” He gazed deeply into my eyes, and I was overwhelmed by the conviction I saw there. And then his mouth crashed down over mine, pushing all other thoughts from my mind.


	3. Chapter 3

April 2013

 

Again, I stared at the computer screen, although at least now I had some direction. Scully had told me years ago that I should write a book, but I had never really taken the idea seriously. However, now that I knew she had been so unhappy that she’d been willing to apply for jobs that required a huge move, I was making more of an effort to “find my purpose”, as she’d suggested. And writing a book wasn’t that terrible of an idea, if I thought about it. Scully and I had covered a lot of ground, uncovered a lot of truths, and it would probably make a fascinating book as long as people were interested in reading about FBI agents chasing down monsters and aliens. I had to laugh at how that sounded. It would probably be best to market any book I wrote as fiction.

But where to start? Did it make sense to go back to when I had first joined the Bureau? Was it best to start with when I had first discovered the X-Files? But really, I already knew exactly when it had all begun. My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds, and I then quickly tapped out, “I fell for her the moment she walked through the door.” I sat back and smiled at the words. As true as they were, I couldn’t make our indefinable relationship the focus of my book and expect to be taken seriously.

Indefinable was still a pretty apt description for the current state of our relationship as well. Still, for the past two weeks, we had slowly been getting better, although Scully was so busy that she was almost always either working or sleeping. Yet there had been one night, about a week ago, that I could point to as a significant turning point. It had been her first full day off in what seemed like forever, and we’d spent it hanging out together as we used to do, just enjoying each other’s company. And then at night, she’d shyly asked if she could join me in the bedroom.

_She, slipping into bed behind me, running her hands along my back all the way down my thighs. I, turning over so we face each other in the dark, seeing each other only through touch. Gathering her into my arms and lifting her over me, smelling her hair, tasting her lips, hearing her moan. Wondering how we had gone so long without this._

_Clothing hastily discarded, and then her face hovering over me, her body rising and falling in an exquisite rhythm, the skin beneath my hands smooth and warm; her eyes closed. Feeling something also rise up in me, a new sense of clarity and strength, feeling pleasure and pressure. And then release for both of us: desperate, powerful, overwhelming. Finally, our coda: succumbing to love and slumber._

Smiling, I shook my head, thinking that I was never going to start this book, let alone finish it, if I got distracted so easily. How had we managed to work so closely together for so many years yet remain (mostly) professional? But no matter, I wasn’t actually serious about writing a book right now anyway. I’d always imagined that memoirs were meant to be written when their authors’ lives were over, as a cathartic way to relive the past. I couldn’t help but hope that I wasn’t yet done and that somehow I could, in some way or another, start anew.

I shut my laptop with air of finality. There was always time to write my book later, like when I was ninety years old and it was all truly over. But that didn’t really solve my immediate problem of how to fill my time in the here and now. I sighed and stood up, looking around my office. I was an unrepentant pack rat in the best of times, and these last few years had been far from my finest moments. The place was an absolute mess. Well, it was as good of a task as any.

For the next four hours, I poured myself into throwing away, straightening up, and scrubbing down. It was hard yet exhilarating work to transform my office into a workable space, to pare down my possessions to just the essentials. I took down many of the random newspaper clippings that had been cluttering up the wall so that my I Want to Believe poster was again most prominent, and I found it suited my mood: I _did_ want to believe again. Grinning at it, I was again grateful to Scully that she had found one and hung it up for me as a surprise when we had first moved here all those years ago. We had lost so much, and this was a familiar bit of home for both of us.

As I continued to stare at the poster, though, I noticed that something appeared to be stuck to the upper corner of it. Only a sliver was visible from behind the poster, but it looked like it could be a picture of some sort. How had I not noticed this before? The clippings must have been in the way. Curious, I walked over and plucked the photo off the wall. And then suddenly, I found myself looking at my son.

It was a small snapshot of William at about five or six months old; he was on his stomach, looking up. I sat down heavily at the desk, gazing at the picture in disbelief. I hadn’t even known that such a picture existed. Scully had told me that when she gave our son up for adoption, she had burned and deleted everything that could link us to him, including all of his baby pictures, for safety reasons.

I had been disappointed, of course, but I had understood. It was nothing less than I would have done if I’d been in her shoes. The year that William had been born, the year we’d been apart, had been terrible for both of us, but it had been much more so for Scully. But, still, I had always been a bit jealous that she had gotten all of those months with him, whereas I had left when William was just a few days old.

And yes, I knew that we’d made the choice for me to leave together. And yes, I knew that her decision to give William up for adoption had been a heartbreaking one for her, a choice that she wouldn’t have made if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary. I had never wavered in my belief that she had done the right thing. But now, holding this picture, I couldn’t help but feel a bit betrayed. Why would she keep this from me? Wouldn’t she know how desperately I would want to see a picture of my son?

I swept my fingers across my eyes. It had been such a long time since I had seen him; I’d had to rely on my memory whenever I thought about William which was, admittedly, often. He was twelve years old now, wherever he was. I wondered what he was doing, what his interests were, if he was happy, and most importantly if he was safe.

But then…why wouldn’t he be safe? Certainly we had been safe here for all of these years. Our research and investigation into the coming apocalypse had revealed a surprising lack of evidence of any extraterrestrial activity. And if we couldn’t find any aliens, then it made sense that they couldn’t find us, either. Which meant that they wouldn’t be able to find William either, even if he’d been living with us.

The thought hit me like a jolt: If we were all safe and there was no threat to be seen on the horizon, then William was no longer in danger with Scully and me. There were no super soldiers, no Smoking Man, and no government conspiracy to hide from anymore. We were just two people again, who had once had a child together.

We could look for William. We could be a family again.

 

*****

 

I couldn’t have said how much time passed after that; it could have been minutes or hours that I sat staring at the photo, mesmerized. Therefore, I didn’t hear Scully come home until she opened the office door behind me.

“Wow, Mulder, the office really looks good. Did you—?” She suddenly stopped short. I turned around and saw her face turn pale as she focused on the picture still in my hand. “Where did you get that?” she asked in a voice higher than usual.

I gestured to the wall. “I found it on the board under some newspaper clippings. It must have gotten stuck behind the poster.” I forced myself to meet her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a picture of him?” I asked, trying to keep a neutral tone.

“It’s…hard to look at him,” she said finally. “I think it’s best, and most healing, to focus more on the present instead of what we’ve lost. It doesn’t do any good for us to dwell on it.”

Her words sounded unbearably harsh to me. “That doesn’t really answer my question,” I pointed out. “Even if you didn’t want to look at him, why not let me make that choice? Why not at least let me know about the picture?”

“Because I couldn’t,” she said shakily. I waited, but she didn’t offer any more explanation. And this was what always happened when the subject of William came up. It seemed we spent the majority of our time skirting around the subject of our son, as if it were possible for us to lead normal lives only if we could manage to forget the gaping hole he had left in our hearts.

But it hadn’t always been this way. Back when we were still on the run, Scully had been a lot more open about William. She had told me stories of the cute things he had done and what milestones he had reached until I could see him too, through her descriptions. It had brought us closer together, I’d thought, until slowly, so slowly in fact that I hadn’t realized it was happening until after the fact, she had built a wall around the topic of William and had effectively hung up a Do Not Trespass sign outside of it. Not knowing what else to do, I’d respected her new reticence regarding our son.

But I couldn’t do that any longer, not when I now held his picture in my hand. For the first time in years, he seemed more real to me than ever, closer to my heart somehow. I had to try to get her to listen. “Scully, I thought of something today. Why can’t we try to find him now? After all, the one concrete thing we learned in our search to find a way to stop the alien invasion was that there are no longer any obvious threats out there against us. We could go find him, Scully,” I said, my voice thick with emotion. “It would be safe now.”

She recoiled in disbelief and then squared her shoulders to face me. I was surprised to see such fury in her ice cold eyes.  “Mulder,” she warned in a dangerous tone.

“Hear me out, Scully,” I pleaded. “You said it yourself: nobody has tried to kill us in a very long time. We don’t have any enemies left, and nobody cares about us anymore. What’s to stop us?” I was getting more excited as I thought about it; I could almost see the happy family reunion.

“We can’t do this,” she said, looking away.

“Why not?”

She took so long to answer that I didn’t think she would. Finally, she asked, “Why do you always have to be looking for something just beyond your reach? I hate what it does to you, Mulder. And what it’s already done to us. Why can’t this be enough?” she asked, gesturing to the space between us.

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. She assumed I saw William as another quest? She didn’t want to look for her son? “Scully,” I said slowly, “This isn’t something I’m doing just to fill up some time. This is about me wanting to be a father to my child.”


	4. Chapter 4

April 2013

 

And there it was: that’s what I had feared for years that he would say; that’s why I had avoided talking about William with him. And just as I thought they would, those words caused my heart to break into a million pieces. I closed my eyes and felt tears burn behind my eyelids.

“Don’t you ever wonder about him?” Mulder persisted.

Did I ever wonder about him? Sometimes I wished I could go more than five minutes without wondering about him, worrying about him, hoping that wherever he was he was safe and happy. William was the reason I had admittedly become a workaholic. There was no real reason that I had to work eighty hours a week, except that it was the only way I could staunch the ever present flood of regret and guilt that gushed out of me if I ever let myself think too hard for too long.

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to find him. He has his own life now, with friends and parents and another life…” And eleven years where our lives had not overlapped once. Time had swept us forward to the place where we were, where I still grieved for my baby even though he was no longer mine and no longer a baby. Wasn’t time supposed to be my friend? Wasn’t it supposed to heal all wounds? It seemed to have done nothing but carve deeper grooves with each passing year.

“I thought you would have been excited to try to find him,” said Mulder with sorrow in his voice. “Now you don’t even want to talk about him. You didn’t tell me about the picture…”

Once upon a time, it had been different. In the random motel rooms where we were hiding out, I’d been eager to talk to Mulder about William, to catch him up on everything he hadn’t been there to experience. But every time he would sigh wistfully or look at me with eyes full of sadness and remorse because he’d missed so many things, it crushed me. Watching Mulder ache for his son never failed to remind me that I had been the one to cause that pain. My unilateral decision, made so many years ago, haunted me every second of my life, but never so much as when Mulder revealed his own grief to me.

“I had tucked it away for safekeeping a long time ago and it must have gotten stuck on one of the clippings or something,” I said weakly. It wasn’t enough of an explanation, I knew, but it hurt to breathe just to have this conversation.

“I don’t get this, Scully,” said Mulder in a frustrated voice. “In all of these years…you didn’t once think I’d want to see a picture of him? You never even talk about him anymore. What am I supposed to think? I can’t believe you wouldn’t want to see him again, find out how he’s been all of these years.” He shrugged helplessly. “Don’t you want to see him again?”

He would never understand that sometimes it was better to hope and to imagine than to know. I didn’t want to find out the truth in this case. I wanted to live with my illusion, the one that allowed me to trust that I had made the right decision.

“It’s not that simple,” I choked out. “Please, Mulder, I’m not ready.” I didn’t trust myself to be able to say anything else.

He stopped and looked at me with compassion in his eyes rather than anger, and that was almost worse. “Okay, then,” he said softly. “We won’t look for him.” And he left the room, taking the picture with him.

Once he was gone, I took several deep breaths to calm myself, knowing that if I allowed myself to break, I might not be able to ever put back the pieces again.

 

*****

 

The weather was getting warmer with each passing day, and the sunshine was calling to me. On a whim, I decided to eat lunch outside on a bench in front of the hospital. Several other doctors and staff members already had the same idea as I did; the front lawn was full of people taking a welcome break on this beautiful day.

As I ate, several of my colleagues walked by, nodding and smiling at me as they passed. Everyone was friendly enough, but even after all of these years, I still didn’t know anyone at the hospital well enough to consider them friends. At first, I had kept them at a careful distance back when Mulder’s future had still been uncertain, but of course that was no longer a necessity. Even so, I was still unwilling to let people get too close, reluctant to put down real roots here, always presuming that this job was a temporary stop in whatever plans I was making for my future. After ten years at the same place, though, I had to admit that my restlessness looked a bit silly from the outside and had only led most of my coworkers to assume that I was only willing to interact with them on a professional level.

This was mostly fine with me, but then, I was usually too busy to notice anyway. On a day like today, though, when everyone around me was laughing and chatting about the beautiful weather, I realized just how lonely I was. It had been a long time since I had an actual friend that I could talk to. Someone with whom I could safely talk about William, someone whose presence didn’t remind me just how deeply my decision to put William up for adoption had affected other people I loved. Someone who wasn’t Mulder or my mother.

As if a genie had granted my wish, a woman who looked to be in her late forties walked over to me, smiling. “Hi Dana,” she said warmly. “Is it okay if I sit here with you?” she asked, taking a seat on the bench before I could say anything. “It’s too beautiful to be indoors today, that’s for sure!”

“Laura, hello,” I replied, grateful that I actually knew her. She was one of the other surgeons that rotated on my floor. “Yes, it is beautiful out.” I sounded ridiculous to my own ears; I was out of practice making small talk.

“So did you happen to catch the season premiere of _The Voice_ last night?” she asked excitedly. “I just love Blake Shelton—he’s my guilty pleasure!” She must have assumed that I loved him too, since she launched into a recap of the episode. I smiled and nodded out of politeness, wondering the whole time what she would think if she knew I’d never heard of that show. _Sorry, Laura, I gave up guilty pleasures for lent—permanently._ In a different life, Laura and I might have been friends, but that all seemed so impossible now.

I longed for a friend whom I didn’t have to explain things to, a friend who already knew what I had been through so I didn’t have to explain it. The problem was that I no longer knew how to get ahold of her. I hadn’t seen or heard from Monica Reyes in over ten years, not since Mulder and I had first started out on the road. It had turned out to be such a long road that by the time we felt safe to reemerge, most of the people we knew had changed numbers and addresses.

I was surprised at how much I suddenly missed her. Sitting here next to Laura, loud and blond, I wished for Monica’s calming presence. It had been such a comfort to have her around, especially when I hadn’t known what to do about William. She had been completely nonjudgmental and had understood why I’d made the decision, even better than I had myself.

“….and, of course, none of that would have even happened if they didn’t have the blind auditions in the first place,” Laura finished. She looked at me and paused. “Are you okay?”

If I looked terrible enough to draw Laura out of obsessing about her favorite show, I had to get it together. So I smiled and said, “Yes, I’m just upset that I missed the episode and I don’t really have time to catch up.”

She laughed. “Don’t I know it! And it looks like work’s calling to us right now.” She stood up and looked back down at me. “Come on, Dana. I’ll walk in with you.”

“No thanks, that’s fine. I’m going to take a couple more minutes to finish up,” I said holding up my yogurt. I didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation indoors where I might not be able to escape.

But it wasn’t always better to be left to my own thoughts. I was still upset at the way Mulder and I had left things the week before, and that’s probably why I had been missing Monica. It was awkward to talk to Mulder about William because he hadn’t been there to help make the decision. He couldn’t help but resent me for it. I knew that if the tables had been turned, I would have hated anybody who had given my baby away while I was gone. But Mulder had never gotten angry; no, he had just gotten sad, which was worse in a lot of ways. I hated being the reason for that sadness. It was as if in giving our son up for adoption, I had given part of ourselves, and our relationship, away as well.

I had never come right out and asked what he thought of my decision. He had seemed to tacitly accept that the only reason I had done it was that there was no other choice. But there was always a choice, wasn’t there? Sometimes I hated myself for not having the courage to protect my son, to die for him if necessary, to go down fighting if it came to that. How could he not hate me too?

And that, I admitted, was a huge reason why I couldn’t look for William, and why I couldn’t let Mulder look for him either. I didn’t want to face someone else who could hate me for my decision even more than I could myself. I didn’t know how to look my baby, my miracle, in the eye and explain why I hadn’t been able to raise him. It wasn’t a conversation I was ready for. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready for it.

I sighed and started walking back into the hospital, back to do my penance. If it took the rest of my life, I would work to try to save every child that needed me to make up for the one little boy I had failed all those years ago. And maybe one day—not today, but perhaps someday—I would be worthy of forgiveness.


	5. Chapter 5

June 2013

 

I’d had every intention of respecting Scully’s wishes. But the more I thought of what it would mean to experience a happy reunion after so many years, the more I knew it was the right choice to find our son. I reasoned that Scully was afraid to start looking because she was worried about the heartache that we might possibly face from false starts and setbacks. It would be a very emotional journey, to be sure, and it sounded like she wasn’t up for it yet.

I could definitely understand her hesitation. She had watched me search for my sister for years, always thinking that this time it would be different, that this time I would finally find her. I had been led down so many dead ends during my quest to find Samantha that it had almost destroyed me several times. So I’d decided that maybe it was better for Scully if I searched for William alone, and spared her the emotional pain of false hope after so long. I figured that I could surprise her once the hard part was over and it was time to bring him home. Picturing how her face would look when I gave her the good news brought a smile to mine. 

All of that rationalizing had led me right here to a restaurant near my old apartment in Alexandria to meet an old colleague for lunch. It was with real pleasure that I stood and grinned when he walked through the door with a swagger. “Doggett!” I called and waved.

John Doggett glanced up and gave me an easy smile. “Mulder, my man! How’s it goin’?”

He sat down across from me and leaned forward to slap me on the shoulder. We’d already caught up for the most part on the phone when I had called him two weeks ago, right after I’d found the picture. Doggett had been extremely surprised to hear from me, but there had also been real warmth in his voice. He was glad to hear that I had made it out the other end of the shitstorm the government had unleashed on me, as he put it. I’d learned that he had gone back to the NYPD and had been working there as a detective for the past ten years.

“I’m pretty good. Thanks for coming down here. You really didn’t have to.”

“It was my pleasure! I’m just sorry that Scully couldn’t be here too.”

I’d glossed over Scully’s absence, saying she’d been too busy to meet. I felt a twinge of guilt at that, sure, but she had been the one who hadn’t wanted to involve Doggett when we were looking into the possible alien invasion. I had suggested calling all of our old contacts, everyone we’d known before in our old life, but Scully wanted to keep it quiet. Well, she wasn’t calling the shots this time. As soon as I thought that, though, I felt a stab of regret. It wasn’t easy to lie to Scully, even if I rationalized it as a necessary lie of omission. I made a mental note to pick up something for dinner that she’d like in order to ease my conscience.

“I’m actually here to talk about, ah, William,” I said, my throat catching on his name. I was unprepared for how emotional talking about my son would be with someone who wasn’t Scully. It was as if the thought of him were too sacred, almost as if he didn’t exist outside of us. But of course, that was ridiculous. The man sitting in front of me had actually known my son better than I did, and that was exactly the reason I had asked him here. I steeled myself forward. “I’d like to know if you can tell me anything about the events surrounding his adoption.”

Doggett looked alarmed. “Is something wrong? Is someone in trouble?”

“No, everything’s fine. But I recently came across some information that helped me decide that it was time for me to start looking for him.” Too late I realized I was using too many “I” statements and sure enough, Detective Doggett caught on.

“Scully does know that you’re doing this, right?”

Damn.

“Well, not exactly,” I admitted. “She didn’t want to get involved, but that’s only because she’s afraid that we wouldn’t able to find him, and she doesn’t want to be disappointed,” I said, trying to take the defensive edge out of my voice. “Obviously she wants to see him again.”

He sighed. “I don’t know about this, Mulder. When the birth mother puts her baby up for adoption, I’m inclined to believe she had a good reason. What about the danger William was in? Why risk it again?”

“Well, Scully and I spent a lot of time over the past few years looking into the super soldiers and anyone else who could have wanted to hurt or take William. We came to the conclusion that the threats are all gone. You must have noticed it too: nobody has tried to come after us in years.”

“You know as well as I do that the absence of an attack doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe. I’m not sure this is a good idea, Mulder. You don’t know what kind of demons you could dig up from the past.”

“Please, John. I need your help. I need to find my son.” I searched his eyes pleadingly, knowing that he was my best chance at finding my son, at putting my family back together.

We faced off like that for a couple minutes until he finally nodded. “All right, I’ll do what I can to help, Mulder. But only because I would want someone to do that for me.” And all of a sudden I remembered the story of his own son. How many personal tragedies were we all silently carrying around?

I exhaled softly. “Thank you,” I said gratefully.

“I’m not sure how much I can help on a personal level, though. I wasn’t involved with the actual adoption. Scully and Monica handled all of that.”

“Really? How can I get ahold of Monica?”

“I have no idea, actually. I’ve tried several times over the years to get in touch with her. I’ve ever tried searching databases to see if she turns up anywhere. It’s like she’s completely fallen off the grid.”

“That’s odd,” I mused.

“Well, you and Scully fell off the grid there for a while too,” he pointed out. “I tried searching for you guys years ago and I couldn’t pull up anything either. In fact, it seemed for a time that everyone who had been associated with the X-Files just kind of disappeared.”

“That sounds like a pretty good conspiracy theory!” I teased. “Except for the fact that Scully has been working at a hospital for over ten years now, and I’m back now too and clearly fine. Monica will probably show up at some point too.”

Doggett shrugged. “She’s not the only one. I also looked into Jeffrey Spender’s disappearance.”

Hearing his name was jarring, and I sat up straighter. “I didn’t know that he’d gone missing.” I thought of the last time I’d seen him, at my own trial, and how his face had been scarred and disfigured, unrecognizable. I thought also of how he had failed to provide anything that could help me but that had not, if I recalled correctly, been on purpose. It was hard to know what to think about Jeffrey Spender.

“Neither had I. Like I said, I saw a pattern and I decided to check out where it led. Which turned out to be a big old dead end.”

“So you really think it’s significant that you can’t find either of them?”

“I’m not sure. As far as your question about William, though, they _were_ two of the last people to see him before he was given up for adoption. I don’t know if that’s significant or not, but that right there might be reason to try to look for both of them.”

I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “I’m wondering if there might be something bigger at play here.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s possible that something happened to them, maybe because of what they knew about the alien invasion or maybe even because of what they knew about William.”

Doggett gaped at me. “You think someone might have killed them? Maybe because of their knowledge about William?”

“I don’t think they’re dead, no; we would probably get more definite answers about that in the form of death certificates. I’m thinking they might be in trouble: in hiding or maybe even abducted in some way.”

“But then why not try to make me disappear too? I was there with Monica and Jeffrey. So was Scully.”

“Well, by your own admission you don’t know anything. And Scully has been with me, and we’ve been pretty vigilant for obvious reasons, so she probably wasn’t an easy target. Honestly, I don’t know what anybody would want with Monica or Spender. It’s just a hunch.”

Doggett nodded. “It looks like we have a couple of things to figure out, then.”

I stood up to leave and so did he. “Why don’t you try to find out what you can about those two through your police channels? I’ll try to look around the area and find out what I can about William’s adoption locally.”

Doggett looked at me and laughed. “It’s a little like old times, eh _Agent_ Mulder?”

I laughed too. “Careful,” I joked. “I could get used to that.”

 

*****

 

Later that day, in the early evening, Scully and I were sitting on the couch together. After a few moments, she cleared her throat and asked, “Did you take the car today?”

Oops. At least she had referred to it as _the_ car instead of her car, which it actually was. “Uh, yeah, I did. Sorry, Scully. You were sleeping and I didn’t want to bother you…”

“No, it’s fine. I’m just surprised you went somewhere. In a car,” she added incredulously. “So, what did you do?”

That suddenly reminded me of a bucket I’d left on the porch. “Crabs! “I said cheerfully.

“Crabs?”

“Yeah, I went down to the docks and got some fresh blue crabs for dinner tonight. Some of the best of the season, they said. Come on, Scully,” I said jumping off the couch. “Let’s steam some crabs!”

Scully looked up at me in wonder. “You left the house and went to _Maryland_? What’s the occasion?” she asked warily.

I laughed. “My leaving the house! Now, let’s go,” I said, dragging her into the kitchen.

Once I got the crabs going, Scully came up behind me and put her arms around my waist. “Thanks for this,” she said into my back.

I turned to face her, putting my hands around her face and kissing her mouth. “It’s just dinner,” I said lightly. But I knew it had made her genuinely happy for me to go out and do something for her, especially if it meant going outside the usual limits of my comfort zone. But making her happy was, of course, just making me feel guilty for keeping my afternoon meeting from her. I rarely kept anything this important from her, and I also knew she would have wanted to see Doggett.

But then I pictured this same scene, only with William setting the table in the dining room, rolling his eyes in mock disgust at our embrace, telling his parents to get a room already. That picture, so real that I felt I could reach out and touch it, only strengthened my resolve. I had to do everything in my power to make that a reality, for us and for him. Standing there with the love of my life, I imagined that maybe, just maybe, William might be able to save us all.


	6. Chapter 6

July 2013

 

_I’m sitting in a boat in the middle of the ocean. The sky is black, punctuated by rapid bursts of lightning. Waves crash over the sides of the boat, over my head. I can taste the salt and hear the thunder and the boat is quickly filling, water rushing around my legs. I look around for a bucket or something else to purge the water, and then as lightning fills the sky I catch sight of my father, suddenly sitting in the boat with me. I turn to reach out for him again and again, but each time he seems to slip further away. Finally I lunge towards him in desperation, but I lose my balance and fall into the dark water. As I fight to swim back to the boat and keep my head above the swirling sea, he looks at me sadly, his eyes telling me what I already know: that if I had only learned to swim, I could have perhaps saved myself._

I gasped and sat upright, not understanding for several moments that I wasn’t fighting for air or freezing in the ocean during a storm. Instead, I was in my bedroom, tucked cozily amidst lavender and gray sheets. The alarm clock said 3:08AM, and I sighed as I realized that I had another few hours before I had to get up for the day. Mulder stirred beside me.

“What is it?” he murmured sleepily.

“Nothing, just a bad dream,” I answered, trying to keep the tremors out of my voice.

Mulder propped himself up on his elbow and looked up at me thoughtfully. “Was it a bad dream or a nightmare?”

That caught me off guard. “There’s a difference?”

“A nightmare is usually based on feelings of helplessness and irrational, intense fear. A bad dream focuses more on interpersonal conflict, something going on in your life that’s bothering you.”

I thought about it. There had definitely been elements of intense fear, but I had to admit that the part about my father was probably more about interpersonal conflict: why hadn’t I been able to swim? Why hadn’t he tried to save me? I felt a bit uneasy about the dream as a whole; my father had been dead for almost twenty years, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dreamed about him. What did that mean? I realized that by asking the question, Mulder had forced me to think about and analyze the dream instead of just push it out of my mind the way I normally would. I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or annoyed by his prescience.

After several moments, he brushed my hair aside gently and asked, “Can you tell me about it?”

Instead of answering his question directly I said, “I lost a patient today.”

Mulder sucked in his breath slowly; he knew exactly what that meant. As a pediatric surgeon, my patients were not elderly and had not already lived fulfilling lives. They were very sick children, to be sure, but they were still children. Every loss was a singular tragedy.

He reached out and took my hand and waited. I thought back to the beginning of the day, how it had started out ordinarily enough with surgery scheduled first thing in the morning, which meant that I would have already been wearing scrubs instead of a suit and lab coat the way I did when my day started with rounds.

Some of the other surgeons likened this switch, between the uniform of a doctor and that of a surgeon, to the transformation from Clark Kent to Superman. I could see what they meant. When we were wore lab coats, we could have been any kind of doctor: internal medicine, radiology, general practice, or dozens of others. But when we were surgeons, we were special. Superheroes. Our patients and their parents certainly thought so, anyway. It was gratifying but also more than a little frightening to know how thoroughly they trusted us to save them.

The surgery was a precarious one, but in my line of work, they all were. I worked with patients who were born with rare congenital defects. My colleagues and I worked against their biology to repair what nature had given them. The work was difficult but ultimately satisfying to provide hope to those who had exhausted theirs. I remembered one mother who confided that when she prayed for her son, she never knew whether to pray to the patron saint of lost causes or second chances. It was a feeling I could relate to.

“Everything had gone fine, a textbook perfect surgery, and then she started to hemorrhage,” I whispered weakly.

Her name was Olivia and she was seven. I had met her the day before and both she and her parents had been in high spirits. Nervous, yes, but looking forward to a life with fewer restrictions if all went well. All had not gone well. She had come out of the surgery fine, but then the monitors had started and the room erupted in a flurry of activity only it all seemed like we were drowning in quicksand as we worked against time.

I was dimly aware that I was crying and that Mulder was stroking my arm while whispering the regular platitudes. But what did it matter if it wasn’t my fault? What did it matter if I wasn’t the lead surgeon in charge? What did it matter if everyone, including the patient’s parents, were fully informed of the risks?

And against my will, I was swept up into the memory of the aftermath, of talking to the parents with the rest of the team of surgeons, listening as my colleague and lead surgeon, Dr. Sturm, discussed the details of exactly what had happened in clinical terms. I watched as the light was extinguished from the parents’ faces, as the realization that their daughter was gone set in. They had fallen against each other, slumped under the weight of loss, and I remembered thinking that they were all each other had and they would have to hold each other up from now on.

Through it all, we had to remain professional, our faces fixed in perfect masks of detached compassion. Nobody wanted to see doctors lose their composure, even though we were all breaking on the inside, too. Every doctor suffers when they lose a patient on the operating table, but we all learned to handle it in our own ways. Over the years, I had found myself reciting the names of all of the patients I had lost as a sort of calming meditation, a rosary to remember those children. As I’d faced those parents, I mentally added another bead to my strand: _OliviaMatthewAvaEthanLaurenTylerHannahCalebMadelineRyanHaileyBrandonLilyJacob…_

Mulder pulled me back down to lie beside him and that dragged me back from the nightmare I’d been reliving. And that was when I realized I had an answer to his earlier question. The images of the ocean, the boat and my father had been a mere bad dream. The actual events that I had experienced that day and would have to inevitably live through again at some point in the future was my nightmare.

He handed me a tissue with concern on his face. “I’m fine,” I answered his unspoken question.

“You should quit working so much,” he murmured. “It’s not good for you.”

“Right, Mulder,” I scoffed softly. “Does that work for you? Do you take it easy when you’re working on something important? When you’re searching for the truth?”

“Is that what you’re doing, Scully? Are you searching for something?”

I thought of the dream, then, and of trying desperately to get back into the boat, of trying to get back to my father. Was I searching for something? “I’m just trying to help these kids,” I said wearily.

“I’m just suggesting that you might want to cut back. Nobody expects you to try to do it all. It’s not worth it.”

“It’s the only thing I know to do, Mulder,” I whispered faintly. “It’s the only thing that makes anything worth it.”

As soon as the words were out, I worried that he wouldn’t understand, but he surprised me and wrapped his arms around me tightly, whispering back, “I know.”

 

*****

 

I always dreaded the first time I returned to the hospital after the death of one of my patients. Our Lady of Sorrows hospital towered over me as I drove towards the parking garage. As I’d thought at least a hundred times before, I didn’t know if the name of the hospital was the perfect fit or a cruel joke.

At least I was only doing administrative work this morning; I wasn’t due in for surgery until later in the week. I walked down the familiar hallways, and noted that they were busy as always with other surgeons rushing away to begin scrubbing in. They were always so excited, so eager to begin again each day. Had I ever been that way?

I remembered one of my instructors in medical school had remarked that surgeons were a different breed of doctor altogether. They lived for their craft; they were driven and passionate and nothing else ever came close in importance in their lives. It was probably telling, I mused now, that I had chosen forensic pathology as my specialty back then.

I was suddenly seized with a sense of nostalgia for my previous work, which of course was nonsensical. Nobody longed to work with cadavers; nobody had a passion for carving up dead bodies like they did for saving lives. But it had made sense in a way that nothing in my life had since or perhaps ever would. I knew where stood with a corpse; there were no secrets that the dead could hide from me.

I sighed and pushed open the door to the common surgical offices where I could sit and catch up on paperwork. I grabbed the requisite folders from the cabinet and sat down with my laptop. Shuffling through the papers, I consciously moved Olivia’s to the bottom to save for last.

While I worked, Mulder’s words from the night before came to my mind unbidden. Should I cut back? The idea had seemed ridiculous the night before. After all, working as a doctor had provided a lot of the fulfillment I experienced in my life over the years, and as a rule, the more I had worked the more right with the world I felt.

But I had to admit that I seemed to be losing the ability to compartmentalize my professional life with my personal, something that had never given me trouble before. As if to confirm these thoughts, my stomach flipped as I turned over the last folder that I had been avoiding. It was getting harder for me to ignore that something wasn’t right and that burying myself in my work was becoming less effective all the time. But was I searching for something, as Mulder suggested? Or was I simply running away?

 


	7. Chapter 7

August 2013

 

We bumped hazardously over the country road, hitting hills at almost airborne heights while my stomach lurched. Mr. McIlroy shifted and grunted at the same time and then impossibly, he pushed the rusting truck even faster than we had been going before.

“Hey, I’m not in a rush,” I mumbled. “I’d like to arrive with my breakfast still in place.”

He grinned over at me. “Gotta drop the chickens before ten o’clock,” the old guy replied.

Well, that explained the smell. I peered behind my seat, through the cab window, and sure enough I saw crates with feathers sticking out of them stacked four tall. This would be a fun ride into the city.

I turned back around and concentrated on breathing through my mouth. For the past couple months, I’d been searching online for anything that might point give me information on William’s adoption. Scully and I had never talked specifically about the particulars of the adoption process; understandably, she hadn’t wanted to go into details. And now that the subject was officially off limits, I couldn’t ask her how she had arranged the adoption, but it was still fine. I was used to the long game, and this would most likely prove to be an easier search than the one that had consumed much of my young adult life. Anyway, there wouldn’t be any Cancer Man this time around to dangle fake Williams in front of me as a distraction. I had no doubt, though, that he would if he still could.

But there had been no real impediment to this search so far except for the lack of information. I had spent time looking up the Maryland, Virginia, and DC adoption registries to find out if there were any records on him at all, even inaccessible ones, but there had been nothing. I’d even checked Georgia, since that’s where he’d been born, but the only thing that came up was a sealed birth certificate, which was to be expected.

I reasoned that I couldn’t find anything on the internet indicating that an adoption had taken place because perhaps Scully and Monica hadn’t gone through the official channels. Obviously, they wanted to keep the adoption a secret, so it had to be done under the radar with no court documents or state records. I had to acknowledge that this was the best thing they could have done to keep him safe, but it also made it harder to find him.

But even if I would have done exactly the same thing in that situation, I knew that an unauthorized adoption had its own risks. Without a paper trail, it couldn’t even be called an adoption at all. It was basically just dropping off a baby to strangers with a hope and a prayer that he’d be all right. That didn’t sound like Scully, though, and I figured she would have used some sort of official institution to help her navigate the adoption, one that would assure her privacy and discretion. And if I could find that institution and talk to the people there about the adoption, I might get somewhere in my search.

Which brought us back to why I was bumming a ride from Richard Petty. I couldn’t keep waiting for Scully to get off work to use her car, and I definitely didn’t want to keep trying to explain what I wanted with the car. So I’d walked out to the main road with the intent to catch a ride into the city and happened to see Alvin McIlroy, my nearest neighbor, cruising by. I’d flagged him down and was now on my way to DC. I guess it was technically hitchhiking, but not really, not if I already knew the guy. Sort of.

After an agonizing ride, we made it to the capital, and he dropped me off at my destination with an agreement that he’d pick me up again in a few hours after my appointment (sans chickens, hopefully). And that’s how I came to be standing in front of St. Teresa of Avila Church.

I’d already looked online to see if the Catholic Charities registry had any information on William’s adoption, but there was nothing. Still, I had a hunch that Scully would have turned to her church in a time of desperation. Was it possible that she’d asked that William be given to somebody in a parish, somewhere that was far enough away so she wouldn’t have to worry but still within the vast network of Catholicism?

With that in mind, I’d set up a meeting with a nun who had worked at Catholic Charities in DC a decade ago and who now worked within this parish. The secretary hadn’t given me much more information, but basically let me know that the Sister knew everything there was to know about the happenings in the archdiocese and would be my best bet in finding out what I needed to know.

With that appointment made, I felt like I was finally making headway. It might sound a bit corny, but I also felt a bit like my old self, too: on a case, so to speak, doing things the old-fashioned way by getting off the internet and into the field. I wouldn’t have admitted to anyone how much I had missed it. The fact that I didn’t have my partner by my side was the only thing that felt off about this, and I forced myself to brush those prickly feelings aside.

I had a bit of time to kill since I hadn’t anticipated that I’d find a ride so quickly, so I passed the time by wandering around the sanctuary of the church. Before long, I found myself face to face with a painting that at first I couldn’t place, but then recognition slowly hit as my mind visualized the pages of a folder belonging to one of our more macabre cases.

This was the church that Scully had told me about years before, the one Phillip Padgett had followed her to. Padgett: the guy who’d written about her, stalked her, and then tried to get into bed with her. She had lost her mind a bit during that case and then had almost lost her heart, too. Multiple shots from her gun but no bullets to be found, or holes, or wounds on her body. Just blood, and a lot of it. Such was the nature of our work on the X-Files.

I didn’t know how long I’d stood there in front of the picture, my head bowed and my hands drawn as if in prayer, thinking of the past, when someone approached me. “Excuse me, sir? Are you the gentleman that has the appointment with me? I’m Sister Anne.”

I looked up into the kind eyes of a woman who was about my age. “Yes, my name is Fox Mulder. I was told that you could possibly have some information about an adoption?”

“I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to help you with that,” she replied. “But we can talk in my office.”

She led me towards some offices in the back of the church and we settled in chairs across from each other in a sparsely furnished and otherwise nondescript office. I jumped in without preamble. “Sister, my son was put up for adoption eleven years ago. It was an uncertain time for his mother and I, and neither one of us has much information about it. We’d like to find him now that we’re—now that we’re in a better position to help him,” I finished.

Sister Anne looked at me sympathetically. “I’ll give you any information that I can. But I think you said on the phone that you’re not sure the adoption was even conducted through the church, is that correct?”

“Well, no,” I admitted. I decided to stretch the truth just a little bit to make it sound more plausible. “Because of a dangerous situation we were in, we felt it was best for us to know as little about it as possible and therefore keep our son safe. Another woman handled all of the arrangements, and we haven’t been able to find her. I have been trying to find any records I can electronically, but so far I haven’t found anything. We thought that perhaps the adoption might not have gone through the normal routes, though, and that you might have information as to a—um—informal sort of adoption that might have happened.”

“There have been cases where we had to do adoptions under the radar for certain reasons,” she said slowly. “But you mentioned on the phone that this was an older baby? I can only recall that happening with newborns. And if there’s anyone in this diocese who would know, it’s me. I’m sorry.”

I nodded. “Well, I figured it might be a longshot. But I have to start somewhere.”

“I assume that you have his original birth certificate? As the birth father, you may be able to request information about his adoptive birth certificate, at least for medical reasons. Have you checked that out yet?”

I thought of the birth certificate, and how Scully had wanted to put my name on it until it had been evident that I’d have to leave shortly after we got home from Georgia. It had been too dangerous to associate myself with either of them, so she was the only birth parent listed on the original form. And of course, I didn’t have a copy of the birth certificate nor any evidence that I was a birth father or that we’d ever had a child together. All that we had left were Scully’s impenetrable memories and my determination.

My silence spoke volumes as I hung my head and she smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Mulder. I know this is difficult. But there are always records, even if they aren’t on file. There is always a paper trail of some sort.”

I lifted my eyes to meet hers. “What do you mean?”

She leaned forward and said softy, “Nobody just gives a baby away without requiring at least a signature. If you can find that paperwork, you can find your son.” She stood to dismiss me but not before saying, “The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.”

I walked out of the office, thinking hard. If there were no formal records through the state, and the nun was pretty sure that the church didn’t have anything to do with the adoption either, then putting that together with what Doggett had told me suggested that what I’d told the nun really must be true. Monica must have made all of the arrangements but for reasons I didn’t completely understand. Had she done it because Scully was too upset? Had she done it to protect William’s identity? Had she done it for some other reason? A sudden thought seized me: _How well did you know Monica Reyes?_ Not very well at all, I had to admit. I’d been out of the picture for most of the time she’d been involved with the X-Files. But Scully had known and trusted her, I assured myself. If Scully had trusted her judgment, then that had to be good enough for me.

And then if my thoughts were somehow able to summon her, Scully suddenly appeared in the church, walking down the aisle towards me. Shit. The last thing I wanted to do was lie to her again. I wondered if it was possible she hadn’t seen me yet. As I was considering the possibility of ducking behind a column until she passed I heard her say, “Mulder?”

“Hey, Scully,” I answered in what I hoped was a convincingly casual way.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m researching. You know, for my book? This was the place where that guy—Padgett—tracked you down and told you everything you ever did.”

She looked uncomfortable. “Isn’t that _my_ story? Why are you putting it into your book?”

“Well, it happened to us while we were on the X-Files. That’s what the book is about.”

Scully, shrewd as ever, started to ask, “How did you even—“

“Anyway, I just wanted to get a better look at the painting that Padgett talked about, the one that had to do with that charm he gave you.” I nodded towards the other side of the church.


	8. Chapter 8

August 2013

 

I looked over to where Mulder was pointing, to the epistle side of the church, and saw “The Sacred Heart of Jesus” staring back at me, unchanged and in its same place. I walked towards it, drawn to the spot I had once stood before. I hadn’t even thought to make the connection that it was the same church when I made the appointment. Transfixed, the memories washed over me: of Padgett, of the loneliness, of the longing.

And then I could see myself lying on the floor of Mulder’s apartment where Naciamento had ripped into my shirt, into my skin, the blood pooling around his fingers. I’d known at that moment that it was finished, that I was dead, and that he’d soon be holding my heart in his hands as he had done with so many other victims. I was dying and failing to kill him in the process. But then all of a sudden Mulder was there but Naciamento wasn’t, and somehow, despite the large amount of blood I’d lost, there was inexplicably no wound and I was okay.

I reflected back on my past self, a younger self who clutched at Mulder and sobbed uncontrollably at the shock and horror of it all, and felt an odd sense of longing for those simpler times when almost dying was the worst thing that could happen to me, and when copious amounts of blood but no wound nonetheless meant that I was fine. That Dana Scully had no idea. She didn’t know how bad it could get. She didn’t know that one day her future self would have to live with the opposite problem: a wound without blood, the telltale evidence that my heart had in fact been ripped out only visible to myself, as if I were the only one who knew it had happened at all.

I shuddered slightly and turned away from the painting, remembering that I was still annoyed that Mulder was researching something I certainly did not want random readers learning about. I thought he was writing a book about our professional lives, but obviously he meant to include some personal stories too. We would definitely need to talk about that later, but right now I had more pressing things on my mind. I turned to where he had been standing and started to ask, “But how did you…?” But Mulder was no longer standing there, and a quick glance around told me he was no longer in the church. How had he gotten there? Why was he in such a rush to leave?

But it didn’t matter at the moment, anyway. I was due to meet with a spiritual director at the behest of my mother’s priest. This was what I got for not only accompanying my mom to mass the week before but also agreeing to take part in confession. Apparently, something I had said must have alarmed the priest since he’d requested I call to make an appointment as soon as I could.

I was a bit doubtful about meeting with someone who held a title like “spiritual director”, as it sounded less theological and more parapsychological, but there really wasn’t any way that I could get out of it, not when my mom agreed that it would be a good idea to talk to someone about my recent restiveness. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea, but I also didn’t want to worry her or be a burden, so I had eventually agreed.

I walked back towards the offices and knocked on the spiritual director’s door. A short woman with silvery blonde hair opened the door and smiled. “You must be Dana Scully. Please come in and sit down. My name is Sister Anne and I’m a spiritual director within the Archdiocese of Washington.”

I sat down across from her and said, “It’s very nice to meet you, Sister. But I have to admit that I’m unfamiliar with the concept of spiritual directors within the Church.”

She smiled and said, “I understand. It’s not a well-known concept among the laity, at least not yet. Nevertheless, there is a rich tradition in our Church regarding spiritual direction, going back as far as St. Teresa of Avila herself, the patron saint of this church. It’s why I feel most at home here. She believed that prayer and daily life were intricately linked and that the more we nurture relationships with others, the more we draw closer to God and his true purpose for our lives. So at its most basic, a spiritual director seeks to form relationships with others to help them on their path to sacred fulfillment.”

“Well, it’s not something that was ever part of my catechism classes,” I admitted.

“It’s undergoing a recent revival of sorts. Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI believed that everyone in the Church should be under spiritual direction, and I have no reason to suspect that our new pope will feel differently. Many members don’t realize the importance of spiritual direction in their lives until they truly start discerning their vocation. That’s why your mother wanted you to talk to me, yes?”

“I think my mother was concerned about an incident that recently happened at work,” I answered carefully. The children were with me, as always, but right now their memories seemed tangible, almost wedged under my breastbone. “I was…upset. But I’m fine now,” I assured Sister Anne.

“It seems like your job is a difficult one, especially if there are so many emotional aspects to it,” she said shrewdly.

I shrugged and tried to look nonchalant. “We have high highs and low lows. It’s the nature of this type of work.”

“But you’re wondering if you can continue to experience these vacillations and still remain effective?” she pressed.

I was silent, not knowing how to answer. Even if I were effective, I no longer knew how to protect myself. I thought of Olivia and how selfish those thoughts would sound out loud.

Sister Anne, ever watchful, nodded slowly at an answer she must have discerned from my silence, compassion etched into her features. “‘Vocation’ is actually an interesting word, both in the religious and secular sense. Of course it can mean your work, your profession. But in the wider sense, it also means calling. You have to figure out if these two definitions converge in your current job. If you have a career but not a calling, then that’s where the issue may lie.”

“But I’m a doctor, a surgeon,” I argued. “Who could have a higher calling than that?”

“Many doctors do indeed feel that their work is a calling. But not all of them do. It has to do with how they feel they feel God is working through them. How do you feel that God is working through you?”

I squirmed uncomfortably and Sister Anne took notice. She asked, “What do you feel is missing in your work these days?”

 _I’m worried that I’m not doing it for the right reasons. I’m worried that the failures are weighted more than the successes. I’m worried that it will never be enough._ But I chose an easier answer, one that Sister Anne would understand. “I guess it’s the idea that if I were to step down, another doctor with my same qualifications, or better, could step into my position tomorrow without so much as a ripple in the machine. I’m not doing anything else that hundreds of other doctors couldn't also do.”

“Is that something you worry about? If you take time off, someone else will take over and do a better job?”

“I’m not sure it’s exactly that. But my partner does think I’m working too many hours. I probably am. But I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere.”

“Your partner?”

Inwardly I groaned. I hadn’t meant to mention Mulder or our indelicate living situation. And on top of that, I had automatically called him my partner. Even after all of these years, it was how we often still referred to each other. It felt the most comfortable, and any other words we could use didn’t come close to describing what we were to each other. I wasn’t even sure there was a perfect word.

“My significant other,” I clarified. “He and I have known each other for two decades. Anyway, he thinks that the long hours have contributed to my erratic sleep patterns and the weird dreams I’ve been having lately.”

“What kinds of dreams?”

Relieved at not having to explain anything more about Mulder, I plunged ahead with describing my latest dream:

_I’m walking through a field of yellow flowers with my sister, Melissa. It’s very cold and snow is on the ground among the buttercups, but we’re both happy to be together again after all this time. But when I look over to tell her how much I’ve missed her, she has disappeared and in her place is a creature with feathers as well as wings on its back, still looking vaguely human but like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Terrified, I grab a log that’s beside me and hurl it at the being. I then try to take it down by kicking and striking its head. Finally, I take a gun out and empty my clip into its chest. But nothing has any effect on the creature who keeps steadily walking forward. Finally, it turns to me and cocks its head to the side as if confused that I tried to hurt it and says in a voice that still sounds like Melissa’s, “But Dana—I’m trying to help you.”_

Sister Anne looked at me thoughtfully once I had finished. “It’s not uncommon, of course, to dream of relatives who have passed on. It is, however, a bit odd to dream of them turning into creatures, but that might be something symbolic. There are examples of dragons and other winged beasts showing up in religious imagery.”

The creature had certainly not looked like any dragon I’d ever seen in popular mythology. But there was no point in explaining it further so I instead asked, “You think my dreams could mean something?”

“It’s difficult to say. The Catholic Church doesn’t, as a rule, condone dream interpretation, or what we would refer to as “superstitious divination,” which is basically looking at dreams as a way to explain our subconscious motives. That being said, dreams that are especially rife with religious symbolism, as yours seems to be, could be a vision of some sort. After all, there is quite a strong tradition in Bible history of God bestowing visions to people through dreams, like in the famous stories of Joseph and Daniel for example.”

“I’ve had a few other weird dreams lately,” I said apprehensively. “But I wouldn’t know the first thing about figuring out if they are visions or not.”

Sister Anne replied, “I’m not in a position to make that call, and I’m not sure anybody else would be either. This is something between you and God. You must, of course, pray and meditate on the dreams to try to discern their wisdom. You can take a pilgrimage to a shrine and dedicate yourself to the mysteries therein. Read the Bible faithfully, especially the passages about God sending visions to the faithful. Finally, you can continue talking to spiritual directors to strengthen your devotion to God and the Church. It doesn’t have to be me, of course. Teresa of Avila noted that when we open our hearts and truly seek, the right person will be directed to us at the right time.”

With that information, I left Sister Anne’s office a bit overwhelmed. It had never occurred to me that my dreams could be something more than random images from my unconscious brain. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with this information, if anything. And I wasn’t quite sure why, but for the first time in a long time, I felt butterflies in my stomach.

 

*****

 

It wasn’t until I was getting ready for bed that I remembered to ask Mulder about the strange conversation we’d had in the church that day.

“Mulder?” I called out.

“Yeah?” He stuck his head out of the bathroom, his mouth foaming with toothpaste.

“You never explained why you were researching Padgett or why all of… _that_ has to go in your book.”

He took a few moments to answer as he finished brushing his teeth. When he emerged, he was wearing gray pajama pants, his chest bare which always made it harder for me to concentrate.

“Well,” he said with a knowing smile, “It’s not like we didn’t have a habit of mixing the personal with the professional. As I recall, we became pretty good at that. And besides, it was an important time of discovery for me.”

“In what way?” I asked warily.

He pulled me to his chest and whispered dramatically into my hair, “‘Agent Scully is already in love.’”

I pushed him away playfully. “But that wasn’t a discovery. You already knew I how I felt about you.”

“No, really, I didn’t. I suspected it, of course. But seeing the look on your face—that was the first time I _knew_ ,” he admitted.

“What?” I thought of all the hundreds of times I had attempted to let him know through looks and touches that I had loved him way before we had ever heard of Padgett or his stupid novel.

“It’s true,” he confirmed. “And I intend to document _all_ of the important moments that happened to us.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and I had to laugh.

“That’s a little sad,” I teased. “I hope your whole book isn’t about how much you love me, Mulder.”

He turned serious and held my face in his hands, looking down at me with warm, soft eyes. “My whole life is about how much I love you.”

And at that, my heart skipped a beat as if to remind me that in spite of everything, it was right where it was supposed to be all along.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

September 2013

 

“You’re not gonna believe it, but I got a lead on her, Mulder,” Doggett began without preamble. I could tell he was excited even through the phone.

My pulse quickened as I stood up and started pacing. “You found Monica?”

“Not exactly, but we might be close. I just got back from visiting family in Georgia over the Labor Day weekend. While I was down there, I decided to poke around the area where William was born. You know, gather any clues that we might have missed.”

I thought back to the abandoned town of Democrat Hot Springs where Monica had helped Scully give birth. “I’m not sure I understand why going there would help you find Monica?”

“She’d mentioned more than once after the fact that while she was there she felt the place had a particular energy to it. You know how she felt strongly about that kind of thing. I figured that if she wanted to hide, she might have returned there. I was down there anyway, so I thought, why not? Anyway, I met a woman who was living there by herself in one of the buildings. She told me that there had been another woman living in the area a while ago who matched Monica’s description.”

“Did she know where Monica might have gone after she left?”

“The woman said it sounded like she was planning to travel north.”

“How far north are we talking? Maine? Canada? The Arctic Circle?”

“She didn’t know. I was lucky to get any info out of her. I wasn’t exactly there on official police business. But the important part is that Monica may have been staying there at some point.”

I sighed. “I don’t know, Doggett. This seems like a pretty flimsy lead. There must be thousands of women around the country who could match Monica’s description.”

“I thought you’d be more excited. It’s something, isn’t it? And come on, you’re telling me that you’ve never jumped on a vague tip? How else would you have solved any of those cases of yours?”

I thought about pointing out that a paranormal investigation was always going to be more tenuous than a missing persons case, but in the end, he was right. Besides, what else did I have to go on at this point? “Were you able to look around to find out more while you were there?”

“Not really. I was thinking that if Monica stayed there, she may have left behind clues as to why she would be hiding out there off the grid, but I wasn’t able to stay long enough to find out. The woman was clearly uncomfortable that I was there. She didn’t want me rummaging around the buildings, understandably. If I had been more cautious from the start, I probably could have. But I didn’t know anyone would be living there since none of the buildings are exactly fit to live in.”

“Do you think you could go back down there in the near future and look around without her finding out?”

“I figured that’s probably something you should do, isn’t it? You’d know more than I would if something there might help in your search.”

“Yeah, I guess I just have to figure out a way to do it,” I said ruefully.

He knew I was thinking about Scully. “That, my friend, is up to you. I’ll still continue to do what I can on my end though,” he said.

I thanked him before hanging up and then sat down to think. I obviously had to go down there to check it out in person. But what excuse could I use to get out of town for a few days that wouldn’t leave Scully suspicious? I considered a few options:

~~I was invited to a family reunion~~

Any invitation I received to a family get together would go straight into the trash without comment, and Scully knew it.

~~I heard about an interesting convention~~

About what, exactly? Wannabe writers? Washed out FBI agents?

~~Skinner called and asked if I would help him profile~~ ~~~~

Yeah, right.

~~I have to go do some research for my book~~

This was probably the only plausible reason I had for taking any sort of trip anywhere. But I seriously doubted that Scully would be okay with me travelling all over to the places we had investigated, considering that there had to be several dozen of them outside of the DC metro area.

I exhaled noisily as it became clear that I didn’t have an excuse that was going to allow me to run off to Georgia by myself. Which meant I had to convince Scully to take a vacation with me.

 

*****

 

A couple weeks later, we were on the road, heading toward the Deep South. At first, Scully had been hesitant, but then she started to talk herself into a vacation with just a bit of prompting from me. Finally, she’d announced that a change of scenery might be exactly what we needed.

She was right, of course. When was the last time we’d taken a trip anywhere? Probably our Caribbean vacation, the one we took right after we’d finished helping the FBI find their missing agent. We had visited the French Antilles and had a good time, but that had been five years ago. It was definitely time to get out of town. I had suggested Atlanta, as there was a lot to do and also it wasn’t too far from Democrat Hot Springs. I planned to wake up early, drive out there to search for information, and return by lunch before Scully hardly missed me at all.

I looked over to where Scully was now gazing out the window at the darkening twilight.

“How much longer, navigator?” I asked.

She consulted the atlas spread out on her lap. “We’re just passing through Spartanburg, South Carolina right now, so we have about three hours to go.”

I groaned. “We’ve been on the road for eight hours already. Maybe we should have just flown.”

She smirked. “It was _your_ idea to take a road trip. But if you’re tired of driving, I could take over. Or, we could even stop here, in Spartanburg. We haven’t made any hotel reservations in Atlanta yet.”

I was reminded of Doggett, then, and Reyes, and the last time I’d been in Spartanburg. We had been working a case about a man possessed by the fire of evil, a case that had led us down here to investigate a murder. That was also the first time that I’d met Monica Reyes, and I remembered that she’d been tough but also intuitive, and I had respected the way she handled Doggett. But I had come down here to find Monica herself, not a memory, and so there was no reason to revisit the area. “Nah, I’m fine. We’ll have more fun in Atlanta.”

“Wanna play a game to help pass the time?” Scully suggested.

“A game?” I asked with interest.

“Yes, a road trip game, like Twenty Questions, Would You Rather?, I Spy, Fortunately/Unfortunately…”

“I’ve never heard of that last one.”

“It’s pretty fun and really easy. I used to play it on road trips all the time when I was a kid. Bill was the best at it, but I always tried so hard to beat him. Basically, you make up a sentence that starts with ‘fortunately’ and then the next person has to say something about that subject to keep the story going with a sentence that begins with ‘unfortunately. The person who is stumped first loses. Want to try?”

“Well, you know me, always looking for ways that I can compare myself to your brother,” I said, rolling my eyes with a smile. “Okay, Scully, you start.”

“Fortunately, I’ve been to Atlanta before, so I know all the touristy stuff we should do while we’re there.”

“Unfortunately, I have no desire to go on _Gone with the Wind_ tours or watch how boiled peanuts are made, so your itinerary might accidentally get lost.”

“Mulder!”

“Quick, Scully, or you’re going to lose…”

“Fortunately, the Braves are out of town this weekend, so we’ll have to do something more upscale instead.”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t pack any nice clothes, so we’re limited to exploring dive bars.”

“Fortunately, I had the foresight to add a suit for you as well as a dress for me in the suiter.”

“Unfortunately, I forgot to grab it when I was loading the car, so it’s still on the back of the couch.”

“Fortunately, I brought lingerie that could also pass for a dress.”

“Really??”

“Quick, Mulder, or you’re going to lose!” Scully mocked me with a grin.

“Unfortunately, my own pajamas aren’t going to cut it for a night out on the town so it looks like we’ll have to stay in.”

Scully suddenly looked over at me with a wicked grin. “Fortunately, I also packed some lingerie that _can’t_ be used as a dress, so staying in works well too.”

Wow. “Um, uh…unfortunately, I lost my train of thought,” I mumbled.

“That means I won!” she gloated.

“Sure, because you played dirty,” I pointed out with a smile.

She smiled smugly. “A win is a win.”

“Bill would be so proud.”

“I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be,” she replied.

We both had a good laugh at that, and as we fell silent again I glanced over at Scully, appreciating the way her cheeks flushed when she laughed. I’d forgotten how much fun Vacation Scully could be. She noticed my appraisal and asked a silent question with her eyes.

“Nothing,” I answered and grinned. “I was just thinking how much I missed driving in a car with you.”

“Too bad we didn’t think to break out the road trip games back then. We could have actually had some fun on our field assignments.”

“Who says we didn’t?” I reached over and took her hand, and she gave mine a small squeeze in acknowledgement.

We played a few more rounds and finally arrived at a nice-looking hotel at 10 PM. At the front desk, I decided to continue our banter and stage-whispered, “Should we get separate rooms, Agent Scully?”

Without missing a beat, she answered, “Only if you can find a way to expense them, Agent Mulder.”

The way her eyes sparkled as she delivered the retort convinced me that she had been right: this was exactly what we needed.

 


	10. Chapter 10

September 2013

 

I awoke to the sun streaming through a break in the thick curtains, and I smiled as I stretched lazily. I was looking forward to a whole weekend of exploring Atlanta with Mulder. I rolled over to see if he was still asleep, but he was gone.

Not thinking anything of it, I wandered over to the bathroom, and that’s when I noticed the handwritten note on the counter next to the sink:

_While we’re here, there are a few things I wanted to research, but I didn’t want to bore you. I’ll be back for lunch. –M_

I sighed and looked at my reflection in the mirror, noting the distinctive grimace on my face. This was so typical of Mulder to ditch me the moment we arrived at our destination. In fact, all of this was so familiar that I halfway expected him to call me at any moment with directions to a morgue where a body awaited an autopsy. At that thought, I was annoyed all over again, this time at myself, knowing that I’d do it without hesitation if he asked. I supposed it should have been somewhat comforting to know that the intervening years hadn’t done too much to change either of us.

Well, one thing was for sure: I wasn’t going to wait around all morning for him to return. I was going to find my own fun.

An hour later, I was wandering through the streets of Atlanta, enjoying the late morning sun. I breathed in the humid air and the scent of the flowers and trees that covered the streets: magnolias, dogwoods, southern pines and oaks. It was such a beautiful city, so different than the one where I spent most of my time.

I bought a couple pecan sticky buns from one of the many bakeries in the area and continued window shopping idly until I found myself in front of a sign that read “The Powers of Pythia.” Below that, the store promised to help patrons _Unlock your Inner Goddess and Discover What your Dreams Really Mean!_

I couldn’t have said exactly what made me push open the heavy door and walk into the darkened building that morning. True, I had been having odd dreams lately, but I didn’t have much faith in finding answers in what amounted to little more than a metaphysical new age shop. I looked around for a couple minutes, brushing my hand across books with titles like _Psychic Senses: How to Develop your Innate Powers_ and _Alternative Realities: The Mystic and the Transcendent in Human Experience_. A younger woman popped up from where she had been arranging items on a lower shelf.

“Hi!” she called out enthusiastically. “We have a buy one get one half off deal on tarot decks through the weekend.”

I smiled and nodded, looking around slowly. After a few moments, she joined me on the main floor and asked if she could help. I shook my head, but she observed my hesitation as well as my clothing choices, which I’m sure placed me decidedly in the non-new age category. “Is there a particular reason you decided to come here today?”

“I was interested in the name of the store,” I told her. “It’s catchy and interesting. I think I remember Pythia from a college mythology class.”

She nodded and said, “Pythia was one of many oracles of Ancient Greece who predicted events based on the dreams that people told them. My own specialty is ALPD, which stands for Active Lucid Precognitive Dreaming. I teach people how to fully participate in their dreams to better understand what those visions are trying to tell them.”

“Dreams that predict the future?” I asked doubtfully.

“Not every dream we have means something. But sometimes, especially when we have vivid or recurring dreams, we can use the patterns to determine what they might say about our lives.”

“But dreams are simply the byproduct of the REM sleep cycle,” I argued. “The brain converts short-term memory into long-term memory while we sleep, and that organizational method generates random images from our experiences, most of which we don’t remember upon waking.”

She smiled. “What if I told you that I had a dream that you would come into my store this morning?”

“Really?” I asked, amazed.

“Well, no, not really,” she admitted with a laugh. “But you just proved that you’re at least open to the possibility. Anyway,” she said smiling warmly, “My name’s Sophia.”

“Nice to meet you,” I murmured, surprised to find that it was true. “I’m Dana.”

She drew closer to me, looking deeply into my eyes and compelling me to do the same. I noticed flecks of gold in her eyes and smelled lavender and jasmine in her hair. “I can see that you’re the poster child for not wanting to believe,” she said softly. But on some level, I think you already do.”

I was struck by how much she reminded me a lot of Monica, not only in the way she looked, with her dark brown hair and disarming smile, but also in the way that she seemed to know who I was right away. And so I guess it could have been the fact that she saw something in me that I didn’t quite see in myself, or perhaps it was simply homesickness for my friend, but somehow I was persuaded to go into her office in the back of the store and learn some techniques of lucid dreaming.

“First,” said Sophia, pointing to a recliner in the middle of the room, “You need to relax and get comfortable.”

I somewhat awkwardly climbed into the chair as she kept talking. “Next, close your eyes and envision yourself someplace safe.” Her voice was low and soothing as she turned out the lights, and despite the fact that it was the middle of the day, I found myself getting drowsy.

“Tell yourself that you will be aware that you are dreaming. You should also choose a sign that will help you remember that you’re just dreaming.”

“A sign?”

“Yes, a dream sign. Something that seems out of place in your dream can remind you that you can control the events that happen. It also helps to think of a person that you have recently dreamed of in order to recall that person back to you. They can help guide you through your dream until you reach a more perceptive state.”

I thought of Melissa and how I had dreamed of her in the field of flowers. No doubt she would have been enthusiastic about trying this technique. Thinking about her had a calming effect on me, and I felt myself sliding toward an invisible precipice.

“Finally…” I faintly heard her say, but I was already floating along a river towards sleep. And then I was dreaming.

_I’m standing in the middle of a road that stretches in either direction as far as the eye can see. There is nothing but desert surrounding me, and I am alone. I feel the hot wind in my hair and smell the sticky asphalt under my feet._

_I shift from one foot to the other, waiting for what happens next, when I notice the image of a lion painted on the ground in front of me. The colors are vibrant, the orange and yellow popping out at me. I bend down to look at it, and the lion’s green eyes shimmer and almost appear alive. And it’s that action that reminds me I’m dreaming. As I stand up again, I remember that I’m supposed to have the power to direct this dream._

_I’m wondering what I’m supposed to do or learn when I see movement out of the corner of my eye. Someone is walking towards me. At first, the person is too far away, but then I see that she is my sister, Melissa, looking as she did when she was a college student, around 19 or 20 years old. She stops right on the picture of the lion and bends down to sweep her hand across it almost reverently._

_I remember that I have a question for her, and I’m pleased that I seem to be doing so well with the lucid dreaming. “What did you mean before, in the other dream, the one with the field of yellow flowers? How were you trying to help me?” I ask her._

_She stands and faces me, her long, auburn hair swishing behind her. “I know you would have saved me if you could,” she says._

_I’m surprised by her candor and try not to think about that awful day she was shot in my apartment. “But I didn’t,” I whisper._

_“You can save them all,” she assures me._

_The astringent scent of a hospital corridor fills my nostrils. “But I can’t.”_

_“It’s in your nature.”_

_“Why are you here? Why do I keep having these dreams?”_

_She bends down again to touch the vibrant image, and again the lion’s eyes appear to glow, a trick of the desert sun. She looks back up at me and says, “You need to remember me.”_

“Dana?” I heard Sophia call softly. She pressed a warm hand on my arm. “You’re awake now. I’m sorry, but it’s important to wake up while you’re still dreaming. It will help you remember your visions later so you can intuit their purpose.”

“I’m not sure I did it correctly,” I confessed, still feeling a bit disoriented. “I was mostly confused.”

Her eyes were like liquid chocolate and filled with understanding. “That’s okay. It usually takes a few tries to really get the hang of it. In the next few hours, or even days, you may remember more of this dream. It will be up to you to determine what it could mean.”

“You mean I’m not going to tell you my dream so you can interpret it?” I asked, thinking of Freud.

“That wasn’t the goal of the exercise. It was to get you more familiar with your style of dreaming so you can recognize what your dreams are trying to tell you. Dreams speak to us in the language of symbolism, but it’s different for all of us. Do some mindful meditation each day and focus on what you want to know from the dream, and it will come to you.”

I thanked her, thinking that her advice was not unlike Sister Anne’s, and then left the store, squinting as I stood in the late afternoon sun. I turned on my phone and saw that I had about fifty missed calls from Mulder. Exhaling loudly, I quickly returned to the hotel room where I observed him lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

He sat up as soon as he heard me enter, frustration apparent on his face. “Where have you been? I told you I’d be back for lunch.”

“Really? And that means I have to stay here and wait for you until then? We didn’t even discuss if we were going to do separate things on this trip. You just got up and left, expecting me to be okay with it. Well, I decided to go out and do something too.”

“Yes, but at least I let you know about my plans. Your phone has been off and you didn’t even leave a note,” he said accusingly. “I had no idea where you’d gone or when you planned to show up. That’s just not like you, Scully.”

“Right,” I said slowly. “It’s more like something _you_ would do.”

We stood facing each other, and I saw a mixture of disappointment and exasperation on his face. I’m sure he saw the same on mine, and again I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. As that thought fluttered across my mind, I felt the tension in the room change and saw Mulder’s eyes begin to soften.

As if reading my mind, he said, “I wonder just how many times I’ve stood across from you like this, with your arms crossed and mouth puckered into a scowl. And how many times I wanted to kiss that scowl right off your mouth. But I never did.”

“And I was always disappointed that you never did.”

Our eyes locked and all of a sudden the stress of being overworked and the tension of the dreams felt overwhelming. I needed him, I needed the release, and Mulder must have felt the same way. We reached across the divide at the same time and melted into each other, Mulder wrapping his arms around my waist as I reached up to pull his head down so I could brush my lips against his. He opened his mouth and pushed his tongue against mine, sliding around it, his breath flowing into me. His tongue tasted familiar, like the sunflower seeds I knew he had been eating as he worried about me. I pulled him to me tightly, wanting to draw him nearer, and he responded in kind.

The first kiss was frantic, needy, as we sought to forget ourselves, but then it deepened and I could feel his hands all over my body, skimming down my back and cupping my butt as he pressed me even closer to his chest. Once we broke apart, each panting a bit, our eyes locked. His eyes were a dark mossy color, filled with complete devotion and as always, my heart caught, realizing that it was all for me. I reached for the hem of his shirt, and he helped me pull it over his head. I ran my hands down the length of his chest, savoring the feel of his skin pulled tight over his muscles.

He slowly unbuttoned my shirt and pushed it off my shoulders, and I realized that I was wearing an uninteresting, off-white cotton bra and said ruefully, “too bad we’re wasting the lingerie.” I meant it as a joke, but Mulder regarded me seriously. “Scully, you’re always beautiful, no matter what.” As if to prove his point, his lips moved down to my neck and lingered near my cleavage, as he buried his head in the valley of my breasts. In one smooth move, he unclasped my bra and I gasped as his mouth found my nipples, flicking each one with his tongue and then biting them gently.

He eased my pants off and pushed me gently back on the bed as he continued to kiss my skin all over, making a trail down my chest and towards my belly. He knew every inch of my body, knew all the places to touch and lick that would make me moan. With his mouth lingering on my hip bone, he looked up at me and smiled while he hooked his fingers around the edges of my panties, slowly sliding them off. I drew my knees up and opened my legs, feeling the wetness pooling there, needing him to touch me. He slowly nibbled his way down to my inner thigh, running his tongue ever closer to the center but not quite where I wanted him. I squirmed and arched my back, frustrated by his teasing. He laughed softly, his breath hot on my skin. “What do you want, Scully?” In our years together, one thing Mulder had taught me was how to ask for what I wanted.

“I want your mouth on me.” I whispered, my breath hitching.

He dragged his tongue over my trimmed hair and licked the inside of my folds that were now slippery with desire. “Like this?” he asked.

“Mmm, more,” I moaned. I grabbed his hair and guided his head to where I wanted his tongue and then let out the breath I hadn’t known I was holding as his lips made contact with my clitoris. “Oh my god, Mulder,” I cried as he sucked and lapped at my clit and then I raised my butt off the bed to grind against him when he inserted a finger, stroking me slowly until I was soaking wet. Realizing I was close, I forced myself to sit up and concentrated instead on undoing Mulder’s belt and his pants, feeling his hardness through the fabric of his clothes.

He helped me take off his pants and then his boxers until he was completely naked. I sat on the edge of the bed and gazed up at him for a few seconds; I would never get tired of how beautiful he was. Wrapping my hand around his shaft as he groaned, I slid my hand up and down, reveling in the feel of him beneath my fingers. “Scully,” he breathed when I took him into my mouth, tasting the salty tanginess. I felt his fingers twine through my hair and heard him groan with pleasure as I licked and sucked, cupping his balls and gently squeezing.

He growled softly and drew me up to face him, placing his hands on my cheeks and kissing me deeply. I lay back on the bed, grabbing his arm to pull him down over me, and then in one smooth move he gently flipped us over, knowing that I preferred to be on top. I poised myself above him, feeling the head slide against the slickness of my entrance, and then slowly lowered myself onto his cock as we both moaned in unison.

We moved together slowly at first, and then gained momentum, meeting each other’s thrusts as we gazed into each other’s eyes. I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I missed him, how much I needed this connection. I moved my hips against him, rocking back and forth faster as I felt the first tingling of an orgasm beginning to build. Mulder reached up to cup my breasts, caressing them roughly as I whimpered in pleasure. I leaned back, arching my spine, until I could feel his head hitting the right spot deep inside of me. His fingers began to rub tight circles on my clit, and it was this action that put me over the edge. I threw my head back and shuddered as the orgasm rocked through my whole body. I could feel Mulder’s other hand tighten on my hip. He grunted and thrusted hard a few more times before emptying himself into me, and then I collapsed on his chest.

After a few moments, I rolled to one side and he pulled me to him. “You’re amazing,” he murmured and kissed my forehead as I sighed into his neck. I was overwhelmed by love for this man who had been in my life in every capacity for twenty years and was still here by my side.

“I love you,” I breathed into him, knowing the words were inadequate to the depths of my feelings but needing to say them anyway. He tightened his arms around me as he murmured the same words back to me, and we lay there silently for a long while, just enjoying the closeness. Until my stomach growled loudly, and we both chuckled.

“Dinner?” he asked as I stood up to walk to the bathroom.

“Sure, do you want to order in or go out?” I replied.

“Well, remember, it depends on what you plan to wear.…”

“Oh? Are you that greedy and looking for round two already?” I giggled and playfully wadded up his discarded t-shirt from the floor and threw it at his head. It sailed past him almost a foot too much to the right and he burst out laughing.

“Looks like somebody is in desperate need of some outfield lessons,” he observed, arching his eyebrows suggestively.

“It’s a date,” I agreed, giggling and ducking into the bathroom as he aimed my bra at me like a slingshot.

 

*****

 

Hours later, Mulder buried his face in my hair and I leaned into his arm, content to let myself drift off to sleep.

But then he shifted and his voice cut through the darkness. “I should have told you,” he acknowledged.

I was surprised that he would say anything about our earlier argument. Normally, we glossed over things after we were “fine.” I let a few seconds tick by as I determined my reply. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“No,” he said, and the single word was infused with disappointment.

I squeezed his forearm reassuringly and started to drop off again, listening to Mulder’s breathing become steady.

But just as I was almost asleep, a puzzle piece fell into place so clearly that I could almost hear it connect.

It had not been Melissa at all in my dream. It had been my daughter. Emily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

October 2013

 

I strode purposefully across the lawn in the late afternoon sun. It was still warm, but the shadows were gathering fast as dusk approached. I was here to visit with some old friends, though I brought nothing, not even flowers, because they would have just made a smartass remark at the gesture. But I felt sure that wherever they were, either as souls, recycled atoms, or hell, even alive and well having faked their own deaths, they understood what they had meant to me.

Arlington National Cemetery was quiet this late on a Sunday; only a few park rangers remained after the visitors had departed. I didn’t come here a lot, but I’d been here enough through the years that I knew exactly where I was going. Frohike, Langly, and Byers had been my confidantes, my business associates, and above all my friends. I still sometimes couldn’t believe that they were gone, especially since I could still hear their voices in my head, giving me advice when I most needed it. That could have meant that I was crazier than I suspected I might be.

I crouched down on the grass and faced the headstones I’d come to see, all three with the same date: April 21, 2002. I hadn’t even been there for the burial. I’d returned a month later to find that so much of my life had been changed in my absence. I’d never stop wondering if things could have perhaps been different if I hadn’t gone on the run. Would I have been able to change anything if I’d been there? If I could have lived that year over again, would I have made different choices? They were intoxicating questions, but without a time machine, I couldn’t know.

 “Hey guys,” I said to the granite stones. “If there was ever a time that you were able to rise up out of the grave zombie-style, this would be a good one.” Back when I worked at the Bureau, almost every time I’d gotten stuck on a case, I relied on them to help me find a new lead or find information, albeit in a slightly illegal way. And so it was no different now. I was here today not only because it was my biannual custom but also because I needed some direction, as I was all out of ideas. I figured that talking to them might help me brainstorm the next step I could take to find William.

In all of my previous visits to this site, I had never mentioned William, so I didn’t know what I wanted to say about him today. In fact, I usually didn’t talk about him with anyone else, especially people who didn’t already know what happened. I’d always assumed that it was Scully’s story to tell. A story that I hoped would ultimately have a happy ending.

I was still feeling mostly confidant about this, even though I had yet to uncover any actual information. The trip I’d taken to Democratic Hot Springs had been a waste of time; the place was completely abandoned with no sign of the woman whom Doggett had talked to just weeks before. I’d spent too much time combing through each building, hoping to find something useful, some sort of clue that could lead me to Monica, William, or even Spender, but beyond the evidence that people regularly used the buildings as temporary housing, there had been nothing out of the ordinary.

How could people just disappear in the 21st century? With all of the GPS and face recognition technology it seemed unlikely that they could just disappear for a decade with no trace. Even if Reyes or Spender were purposely keeping a low profile and not using their real names, which seemed likely, since it was suspicious that I couldn’t find any activity on them at all, it was still hard to completely disappear in such an electronic world. I had a little experience with this myself, and I had to admit that in the beginning, even when Scully and I were on the run and using assumed names and disguises, if someone had wanted to locate us, they probably could have if they knew how to do it.

Not many people did, though, and that’s why these three would have been first on my list of people to call. “Let’s see, what would you guys be doing to help me?” I continued out loud to the silence and the fading afternoon sun. “Langly, you would have hacked into the online national adoption registry, Byers would probably search communications databases and financial institutes for activity, and Frohike, you’d be making the huevos rancheros,” I finished with a grin.

But though I didn’t have the hacking skills, I thought I had been pretty thorough so far in my search. Even if I missed some obvious step to finding someone (and at this point, I would have been ecstatic by a substantial clue leading to any of the three) I was reassured that I also had a detective on the case. But he was also coming up empty and I was stonewalled now, but I believed it had to be only a matter of time before I found something. I hoped it would happen soon; every day I was becoming more anxious about keeping this from Scully. We’d had such a good time in Atlanta and had connected on a deeper level than we had in a long time; it seemed the breakthrough I’d been looking happened for our relationship, if not for my search. But still, I was guilt-ridden that the whole reason we’d gone on the trip was built on the lie I had to tell her.

I wished I could talk to her about it, and not only for her expertise. I wished the topic of William wasn’t off-limits between us. But most of all, I wished I’d been there for her. This was my small, inadequate way of trying to right that wrong. And so, this was just a puzzle I had to solve, and if I could see what the missing pieces were I could figure out how to put it all together. There was something I must be overlooking, something that would help in my search. “What should I do next?” I asked the shadows. I half-expected an answer, even an ethereal one, but the park was completely silent. But I still felt renewed even if I didn’t feel their presence; I knew I had to keep going. As Scully had said, it was the only thing that made any of this worth it.

“Well, until next time,” I said. “Don’t be shy about haunting me.”

I turned and followed the same path I had created on the way in, and although it was darker now, I could still see my way.

 

*****

 

When I arrived at home, Scully greeted me at the door with a quick kiss. “How are the boys?”

“Oh, you know,” I said lightly. “Pains in the ass as always; had to do all the talking myself.”

“Sorry I couldn’t make it,” she murmured and looked up at me. “How are you?”

“I’m the one on the right side of the grass, so I can’t complain.”

She shook her head and sighed, but her upper lip twitched, threatening to curve up into a smile. “Come here,” she said as she led me through the house to the kitchen. “I have something for you.”

She reached up on tip-toes to cover my eyes before letting me walk into the room. “Look, Mulder,” she teased as she removed her hands. “Real candles!”

The kitchen was dark, except for the light from the moon that shone in from the window and the glow of two candles that had been stuck in an oversized cupcake. As I drew closer, I could see that the candles were in the shape of a 5 and a 2.

I squeezed her shoulders appreciatively but then frowned in mock displeasure. “Hmm,” I mumbled and quickly plucked both candles out of the frosting and inverted them, so that now the number read 25. “Ah, that’s much better,” I said with satisfaction.

“You’d really want to go back to that time in your life? If you were turning twenty-five today, we wouldn’t even know each other yet,” Scully pointed out.

I thought back to who I’d been at twenty-five, over half a lifetime ago, when I had just graduated from the FBI Academy and had my whole career ahead of me. I recalled that just earlier today, I’d wanted a time machine to go and right the wrongs of my life. But what if instead of just going back to that year when I’d been gone, I could truly go back to the beginning, back to when I first joined the Bureau, and start all over again? Could I have chosen a different path?

Everything good and bad that had happened in my life was tied to the X-Files, and to Scully. Like a tumor that had twisted around vital organs, making it inoperable, I doubted that I could ever extract the bad so that just the good could remain. For instance, I would never be able to go back in time and change things so that William had never existed, even if that choice would objectively lessen our heartache and make our lives more bearable, because I would never be able to choose to erase his existence. And maybe that was why time travel was impossible. Maybe it wasn’t so much a scientific paradox but an emotional one; simply considering the sheer impact of any choice that we could do or undo would render us paralyzed. But this wasn’t the time to dwell on such thoughts, and I forced myself to concentrate on the present.

“Who wouldn’t want to be in their mid-twenties again? Fewer aches and pains. No worries about blood pressure or high cholesterol. Oh, and I’d still have my boyish good looks,” I noted.

“If you’re fishing for a compliment about how you’re still ridiculously attractive, that’s not gonna happen,” Scully said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, are you going to blow out your candles?”

“I have to think of a wish first,” I replied, grinning. “Now let me see…what could I possibly want?”

“Hurry up, the wax is starting to melt all over the chocolate.”

Raising my eyebrows suggestively, I said, “I’m pretty sure I can think of a few things we could do with melting wax. In fact, I’m thinking of my wish right now...”

I was rewarded with a laugh, one of those rare and genuine laughs that bubbled up out of Scully without warning. The first time I had ever heard it, I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to hear it again. “Nice, Mulder,” she said, smirking.

“It’s the least I can do for all the trouble you went through in reminding me how old I am.”

She raised her eyebrow at me. “Is that the same as a ‘thank you’?”

“Only if _that_ is the same as a ‘happy birthday’,” I replied.

Smiling, she leaned into me as I wrapped my arms around her, a fluid move we’d done thousands of times. “Happy birthday, Mulder,” she murmured into my chest.

“Thank you, Scully,” I responded, stroking her hair.

We stayed that way for some time, breathing each other in and enjoying the glow of the candles that were indeed dripping wax onto the frosting, when I realized that at some point we had started swaying back and forth slightly as if to the rhythm of a song, even though the house was silent.

I didn’t know that Scully noticed too until she said, “If you wanted to dance with me, you probably should have turned on some music first.”

“Do you want me to?” I asked. “What do you want to listen to?”

She smiled. “Surprise me.”

I stopped and looked down at her and into her eyes. The dim lighting made them look darker than they really were, like the color of the ocean on a cloudy day. I remembered another night where her eyes had looked just like this in the moonlight, a memory I knew she would have kept as well. “As a matter of fact, I do have something in mind,” I said softly. I leaned down to her ear and swept her hair back, and quietly sang, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog…” I made sure to mimic Scully’s adorable tone-deaf singing voice as close as I could.

Fully expecting another laugh from those beautiful lips, I pulled back and looked down at her with a grin. But instead, an expression of sadness flickered across her face and then was gone in an instant. “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

She waved her hand away. “Nothing. I liked your singing,” she said, smiling. But I knew I hadn’t imagined it.

“I was just trying to…”

“I know.”

“The trip we took, when we were supposed to go to that convention, remember?” I said, inadequately. “We were in Florida and I was hurt and you—“

“I sang that song to you. I remember,” she said casually.

“Scully, I didn’t mean—“

“No, I know, I’m fine. I’m just tired. Let’s go to bed.”

Scully abruptly leaned over and blew out the candles herself, removing any chance of my making a wish, a real wish. She stood back up to face me, but now with only the faint light of a half-moon, it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. And I couldn’t help but wonder that even if we could manage to achieve happiness, if the past would always find a way to wrench it away, again and again.


	12. Chapter 12

March 2014

 

Over a dozen books were scattered on the table in front of me, and I was taking notes on everything from occultism to dream psychology to lucid dreaming. I’d been in the Lauinger Building of the Georgetown University Library for hours, yet I hadn’t gained any new insight to the answers I sought. Still, the subject was fascinating, so different than the straightforward medical journals I was used to reading. In this field of study, everything was awash in symbolism; nothing was what it first seemed to be.

I’d recently cut back my hours at the hospital in order to advance my research into what my three strange dreams meant, either together or separately. Although I had previously been able to brush off the dreams as reactions to stress or sleep deprivation, seeing Emily, especially at the age she would have been had she lived, affected me more than I’d first realized. Why had she appeared to me as an adult rather than as the child I had known so briefly? Was it a mere dream or a visitation? I had so many questions, which was why I had been spending more and more time in various libraries around town.

I could no longer deny that the dreams held meaning or that I had been meant to receive them. Each person who appeared in my dreams had been an important person in my life and now they had messages for me, information they wanted me to know. But I couldn’t seem to make sense of what I was supposed to do with it. At first I thought that if I could just have another dream, even one more, I could somehow understand everything more thoroughly. But the techniques of lucid dreaming eluded me and meditation had not helped either. I had to accept that perhaps three dreams were all that I would be given.

Shifting in my seat, I stretched slightly and looked once more at the notes I had jotted outlining each of the dreams. I knew that if I could just connect the dots, the patterns would emerge. There were so many pieces before me but I just couldn’t seem to put them together in a meaningful way yet. But it didn’t stop me from trying because if I was being honest with myself, it felt good to use my mind in this way, to focus on something that didn’t have neat answers, that didn’t fit into a textbook. Something that helped me stretch and grow and learn in new ways and that required me to unknot a problem, not unlike sorting through a jumbled bin. Also, it was a good distraction from something I didn’t necessarily want to think about.

I knew Mulder was looking for William.

I’d known for a while now, but I hadn’t said anything to him about it. I guess I was trying to give him the chance to tell me first before confronting him. I had no desire to confront him, no desire to talk about it at all, really; in truth, I wanted to forget I knew. I wasn’t sure what hurt me more, the fact that he’d chosen to search for William against my wishes or that he’d kept it from me so easily for all of this time. It turned everything between us into a lie: the jokes and laughter that came so effortlessly as of late, the easy rapport that we’d gained since everything fell apart in 2012, the intimacy that we’d shared in Atlanta.

I hadn’t needed to go out of my way to discover Mulder was searching for William, no snooping required, but I wasn’t a former FBI agent for nothing. There had been definite clues, of course, but the biggest one, and the one that should have been on my radar sooner, was the obvious change in Mulder’s temperament. I should have known that the reason he became more hopeful, more lighthearted, more like the person he was when he was actively working a case was because he was, in fact, working on one. I first thought that writing his book had helped him actively remember the past and all of the emotions we’d experienced back in the day. But after putting those pieces together (an easier task than deciphering my dreams; it’s hard to keep too many secrets from those you live with) I saw that of course it would take more than reliving the past to bring Mulder out of his melancholy.

And after the manic optimism, I was holding my breath, waiting for the inevitable crash to follow. _His_ patterns, anyway, were easy for me to read. I had to concede that it was also possible for him to actually find William. I knew he hadn’t yet found anything promising; he wouldn’t have kept something that important from me, I was sure. Also, I’d used all the connections I had at the time to ensure William was safely hidden, even and especially from me. But I had to allow that it wasn’t impossible. Nothing ever was.

I quickly glanced up and frowned. The same man had strolled casually by my table at least three times that I’d noticed in the last hour. He looked a bit older, tall, with silver hair and intelligent eyes. He saw me look at him and stopped, looking as though he wanted to approach me. Inwardly, I braced myself and asked, “Excuse me, did you need something?”

The man looked grateful for my acknowledgement and stepped closer to the table. “I haven’t noticed you here before,” he said with a polite smile. “I was wondering if you were also a scholar.”

“I’m a medical doctor, a surgeon,” I responded. “I’m not affiliated with Georgetown, though, so I don’t come here often.”

He sat down across from me, uninvited. “I once thought about becoming a doctor as well,” he said conversationally. “But I decided to go the academic route instead and earned a PhD in psychology. I’m on the faculty here at the university.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it as an automatic response. “I’m Don Whittenham,” he said, smiling easily. “You can call me Don. Everybody does.”

“Dana Scully,” I murmured, wondering why he was interested. Was he _interested_? I momentarily panicked as I debated between feigning busyness and bringing up Mulder.

He saved me by indicating the books between us. “I’m sorry if I seem rude, but I couldn’t help but notice your reading material; that’s why I felt compelled to introduce myself. You reminded me of myself a long time ago, when I was trying to understand a series of odd dreams I’d been having.”

For the first time, I allowed myself to meet his eyes. “And did you?”

“I wasn’t able to decipher any of the messages, no. But the dreams did end up preparing me for when my wife of twenty-two years, Amelia, was in a bad car accident a few months later. The doctors said it was a miracle she even survived, but she did receive a traumatic brain injury that has left her with severe mental, physical, and emotional disabilities,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down at the table.

“You don’t need to be,” he said lightly. “It did seem like the end of the world at the time, when she was first diagnosed. But we’ve come a long way since then.”

I nodded. I couldn’t help but wonder what my own dreams might portend, if I could expect to face more heartache.

“It’s been nine years now,” he continued. “We haven’t had the easiest time, but we’re doing all right. It became far easier when I listened to advice and we got a dog.” He grinned. “His name is Caramel and he’s huge and slobbers everywhere, but I have to admit that it made things a lot better, especially since we were newly empty-nesters at the time too. Our two boys are now twenty-seven and twenty-nine. Do you have children?”

My stomach clenched involuntarily at his question. It was asked so casually because for most people it was such a simple question. An easy yes or no. But I had never gotten used to answering this question, still wasn’t sure what to say even all of these years. I could have answered that I had a child but I gave him up for adoption a long time ago. Don might have been okay with that. But I couldn’t mention William without Emily. And I knew that any answer which involved me telling him that I had not one but two children who were now lost to me would wipe that friendly smile off his face. Not that I would have blamed him. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t keep my children? I had no doubt that if I were somehow given a third, that story would end badly too.

“No.”

He nodded, and I was relieved that my face hadn’t betrayed any of the distress I felt at his question. “I’m sure that being a surgeon isn’t conducive to having children, what with the long hours and all,” he said sympathetically. “Amelia and I were married right when I was beginning my own career. I started out in clinical psychology, but after the accident my priorities shifted and so did my research interests. I thought about focusing my research on dreams since they’d had such an impact on me. But I didn’t see how I could continue a career by focusing on topics that nobody gave credence to. It wasn’t the way to earn or keep a reputation in the academic world. Well, not a reputation I wanted, anyway.”

_Nor in the bureaucratic world._ Refusing to care about our reputations early on was partly why Mulder and I had ended up where we were today. Now, I was too focused on maintaining mine in the medical field, even to the point of refusing to talk about my past at work, while Mulder had given up establishing a new one at all. Not that I could blame him. We all managed our disenchantment with life in different ways, Don Whittenham included.

The announcement that the library was closing startled me, and we both looked up at the clock on the wall at the same time. It was a quarter to ten.

“I’ll walk you out to the parking garage,” Don said, helping me gather my belongings from the table and neatly stacking the books.

“It’s okay, I’m fine,” I replied.

“I insist. Just in case any monsters or demons try to attack,” he joked.

I smiled wryly. The monsters never chased me anymore, but the demons were a different story. “Lead the way,” I acquiesced. But instead, he took my elbow and guided me through the library and out the door as if he were a gentleman from another century. I let him; he had no way of knowing that if something actually happened, I’d probably end up protecting him rather than the other way around.

When we arrived at my car, I expected him to do the usual niceties and goodbyes. But instead, he turned to face me, still clutching my elbow, and looked intently into my eyes. “Keep going, Dana,” he said softly. “It will help, I promise.” I’d been wrong about him; he _had_ noticed my sorrow when I thought about my children.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Search for the answers, even if you can’t find them. Don’t give up,” he said, and turned to walk away.

I stared after him for a moment before getting into my car, wondering how someone I’d just met could know exactly what I needed to hear.

 

*****

 

Days later, we were sitting on the couch, as we usually did in the evenings when we were home together. I was reading and Mulder was on his laptop, the screen angled away from me. Every time he was preoccupied like this, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing. Sure, he could have been doing research for his book (was he even writing a book at all?) or perhaps looking up the latest stats on the Knicks. But now I knew it was equally possible that he was searching for more ways to find William. I hated having to question everything.

I tried to look at us the way any outsider would, snuggled under a blanket on an unseasonably cold evening, companionably sharing the quietness. But only we knew the secrets we kept from each other; only we understood what the silence costed us. Would we ever be able to get past any of it? I thought back to Don Whittenham and what he and his wife had endured, and yet he had seemed to be at a place of acceptance and peace with his life.

“I think we should get a dog,” I announced.

My words were abrupt and startled Mulder. He sat up quickly and shut his laptop with a sharp click and faced me. “A dog? What?”

I shrugged. “It might be nice to have something to take care of.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized what they sounded like. Or maybe this was on purpose; maybe my subconscious had wanted to challenge him. I looked at Mulder, but his eyes slid away from me. William’s presence hung so tangibly between us that for a moment I thought that one of us had actually said his name out loud.

A few tense seconds passed and I wondered if he was finally going to tell me what he’d been doing. But when Mulder looked back at me, his mouth was fixed in a grin. “Are we talking a _real_ dog or another ankle biter like…what was his name again? Tashtego? Fedallah?”

I laughed, and despite myself I felt myself relaxing as the tension dissipated. It was easier to be swept away by Mulder’s charm rather than face what I would rather forget. “You know damn well what his name was,” I said with a smirk. “Poor Queequeg…why did you hate him so much anyway?”

“It’s not that I hated him. I’m just not a dog person,” he explained.

I raised my eyebrow at him. “I didn’t know we could divide people up by their pet preferences.”

“Sure,” he replied. “There’s dog people and there’s cat people.”

“You’re a cat person?” I asked doubtfully.

“Nah, they’re too independent. Maybe we’re both fish people,” he suggested. “Low maintenance.”

I nodded slowly. “They don’t expect much from you, so you can’t disappoint them,” I said softly, proving again that it was impossible to avoid the subject completely. All of our conversations had been like this lately: a precarious and increasingly tenuous dance around certain topics in an effort to preserve our normalcy. _Tell me you’re looking for him. Tell me it’s my fault the house is too quiet without a rowdy teenager stomping through it._

“I don’t see _you_ ever disappointing anyone, Scully,” he said with conviction, reaching for my foot under the blanket and giving it a reassuring squeeze.

I stared into his eyes, not knowing what I was searching for, and found only the kindness and the fierce passion that I’d first fallen for. I understood in that moment that he was not trying to hurt me, and that he didn’t want to keep these secrets. This was a man who was justifying the search for truth as he always did, who needed answers like he needed air to breathe, who believed that the ends would justify the means.

And so I went to bed that night, as I had countless nights before in the whole of our tumultuous history, still devoted to and yet utterly frustrated by the love of my life.


	13. Chapter 13

April 2014

 

I was perched at the kitchen table, coffee mug in hand, scanning the adoption message boards online. It was a pretty typical morning for me these days, and I’d become very knowledgeable about all aspects of adoption. Fascinating though it was, however, it hadn’t brought me any closer to finding out anything about William. Still, all of the message boards included threads from adoptees looking for birth parents. It was a longshot, but perhaps William was looking for us too.

Scully walked into the room, wearing a tank top and pajama pants, and waited a few seconds until I had closed the laptop before moving behind me to pour herself some coffee. “So what’s been going on in the world lately, Mulder?” she asked, indicating the computer.

“A woman recently gave birth to a four-fanged bat child, the ghost of John Lennon was seen at Disneyland, and there are rumors of a snake that grew human feet. Oh, and the Dow Jones is on the rise,” I quipped.

Scully smirked and took a swig of coffee. “Oh, by the way,” she said, trying to sound casual, “my mom invited us to her house for Easter next week.”

“If that means church at the crack of dawn, I’ll pass.”

“We didn’t visit her at Christmas,” she pointed out. “It would be nice for us to go see her.”

“ _Just_ her?”

“Yes, Bill is stationed in Germany now,” said Scully, rolling her eyes. “And it would be a quick trip—just the weekend. Really, it would only be Saturday for dinner and then Sunday morning.”

Damn, that _did_ mean sunrise mass. I must have grimaced because she sighed and said, “Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t even going to mention anything to you.”

I had just decided to suggest she go by herself when it occurred to me that the only other person left who might be able to help me find William was Margaret Scully. I didn’t imagine she had any actual information, but she might remember something useful that I could apply to my search. If we were going to be there for a couple days, surely I would be able to have a few moments alone to talk with her. “I suppose we can do Easter at your mother’s,” I conceded.

“Really?”

“Don’t look so surprised, Scully. You know I love a good Easter egg hunt,” I said wryly.

She headed towards the door, shaking her head at me, and I opened my laptop again and was immediately immersed in the adoption boards.

“Mulder?”

“Hmm?” I hadn’t realized she was still standing there. I looked up at her and for a moment it seemed like maybe she was going to joke with me, perhaps say something like bat children were born with two fangs, not four, and how was it possible I didn’t know that too. But she remained silent, watching me. “Yes?” I asked again.

“Nothing,” she said and walked out of the room.

 

*****

 

“Dinner was wonderful, Margaret,” I said, and I meant it. Even though it was just the three of us, she had made baked ham, scalloped potatoes, and roasted asparagus. She’d even made a cake shaped and decorated like an Easter bunny, even though had her grandchildren been here, all of them, including William, would have been too old to get excited about it.

“Thank you, Fox,” she said, smiling. “I don’t often get to prepare full meals anymore. It’s a pleasure when family visits.”

Scully visibly squirmed with guilt. “Thanks for cooking, Mom. Mulder and I will wash the dishes so you can relax.”

“I’ll do them myself,” I interjected. “Scully, you said earlier that you wanted to take a long bath. Why don’t you do that while I clean up?”

“That would be great, thanks,” she said, and I watched as stopped off in the den to select a copy of _Wuthering Heights_ off a shelf before going upstairs.

Margaret offered to help me with the dishes, and it appeared I had my opening to talk to her. But as we stood side by side at the sink, we were silent for several minutes, the only sound that of the clinking dishes as I washed and she rinsed and dried. Now that I had her alone, I wasn’t exactly sure how to bring up the subject of her absent grandson.

“How are things going with you?” she asked conversationally.

“Not bad,” I replied automatically. Then I gritted my teeth and decided to just come out with it. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something. I’ve been searching for William.”

Margaret startled and then pressed her hands on the edge of the counter. After several seconds, she asked, “Have you…did you?” The hope in her voice was unmistakable. But when she turned her head toward me and saw my face, her eyes dimmed.

“No, nothing,” I responded softly. “But that’s why I wanted to talk to you. I was wondering if there is anything that you might know, anything at all that might help me find him.”

She sighed and took a platter from my hands. “I tried to find him years ago,” she admitted. “I never told Dana.”

“She’s not really receptive to looking for him,” I said carefully.

“We should sit,” she said abruptly, motioning me to the dining room table. “The rest of the dishes can wait.” She poured us each a glass of pinot noir and we sat across from each other.

I waited while Margaret took a sip of wine and gazed out the window contemplatively. Finally, she said, “I remember when I first saw William, when I went over to Dana’s place right after he was born. I was so happy for her, for both of you,” she said, looking into my eyes. I nodded. I remembered that day too; we’d all been so happy.

Margaret continued, “When she told me she’d named him William, I wasn’t surprised. She said it was for your father, of course, but it’s an important name in our family as well. He comes from a family of strong men named William: it was my father’s name, and my brother’s, as well as my husband’s.” Smiling a bit apologetically, she continued, “My son is named William, too.” I worked to keep my face neutral at that, but my feelings must have shown anyway because she caught my eye and started to laugh. Startled, I couldn’t help joining in.

After a few moments when our laughter died away, she looked at me fondly, and I realized that this woman, whom I’d always thought of as Scully’s rock during all of the hard times she’d had to endure, loved me too and not just because of my relationship to Scully. She thought of me as one of her children, and I was grateful to her for supporting me for so many years, even though I hadn’t always been good for her family.

As if reading my mind, she reached across the table and took my hand. “We’ve known each other for twenty years now,” she said quietly. “And you know how happy I was that you two fell in love and had a child. You know how much I love William and that there is nothing more in this world I would like than to see him again. But you can’t do this without her,” she said firmly. “That’s what I’ve had to realize, too.”

I breathed deeply and Margaret squeezed my hand. “She doesn’t even want to talk about it,” I said sadly.

“She’s afraid, Fox. She’s afraid of having to look in his eyes and see the disappointment at having failed him as a mother.” I looked up at her and the pain on her face was clear. She was talking from experience with her youngest son, I knew. “And it’s not something you can talk her out of. She needs forgiveness.”

“I don’t blame her. I never have,” I said fiercely. “She knows how I feel.”

“Not from you. She can’t forgive herself,” replied Margaret.

“But how can I help her do that?”

“There’s nothing you can do; she needs to get there on her own. But one day she’ll start talking and you can be there for her and listen. That’s when you’ll know she’s open to finding him.”

“I can’t just give up on looking for him. Is that what you think I should do?” I asked, extracting my hand from her grip.

“I think you need to talk to her and get on the same page about it. Relationships have failed because of much less,” she cautioned me. I knew she was right.

Sighing heavily, I downed the last of my wine glass before standing to return to the dishes. Margaret rose too and gave me a small hug as she steered me not too subtly towards the stairs instead.

I trudged upstairs slowly, not wanting to have this conversation with Scully but knowing it was inevitable. There was no easy way to admit that I’d basically been keeping something important from her for so long. I was afraid of what her reaction would be, but I hoped I would be able to make her somehow understand why we had to do this.

Knocking lightly first, I pushed open the bathroom door and saw that Scully was still soaking in the tub and reading. Her eyes lit up when she saw me. “Hey, you. I was just about to get out. Towel, please?”

I held out her towel while she stood up in the tub, water and bubbles cascading down her beautiful body, creating rivulets between her breasts. She stepped forward into my arms and I wrapped the towel and my arms around her, breathing in the scent of strawberry and apple in her wet hair. God, I wished I could forget everything and just hold her, touch her, make love to her.

She must have felt the same way because I felt her wriggle closer against me suggestively. Turning her head toward my neck, she let the towel drop off of her shoulders and whispered in my ear, “Thanks…is there anything I can do for you?” If it hadn’t been for the talk with Margaret still weighing on my mind, I would have lost all willpower.

“Scully,” I said, my voice too somber for her playful mood, “I…Scully, there’s something I need to tell you.” I looked resolutely into her eyes and then paused. The way she avoided eye contact, the way she was bracing herself…I stepped back in surprise. She already knew. “Why didn’t you let me know?” I breathed.

She somehow seemed smaller to me, more vulnerable, clad only in a towel with her wet hair clinging to her neck. “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“When did you figure it out?”

“It’s been a few months,” she admitted, her voice cracking.

I shook my head, processing her words. I realized that she’d been watching me lie to her every day. “I didn’t mean…” I began to say, but then stopped. Anything I could say at this point seemed inadequate.

“I know,” she replied quietly. She looked up at me, her eyes clear as glass and just as breakable.

“I never would have done this if it had been anything else, Scully.”

“I know,” she repeated. She placed her hand on my arm and this time her eyes were full of compassion. My own eyes questioned her.

“All of this happened because of what I did first,” she said softly, looking away. “If I hadn’t pretended that the photo of William didn’t exist, if I had been more honest with you about why I didn’t want to talk about him, then maybe you would have understood and not run off without me to look for him.”

“There wasn’t—“

But she went on, “I’m not blind, Mulder. I see you looking at his picture when you think I don’t notice. I didn’t want to keep it from you. It just kills me how much you miss him and I…I hate that I’m the one who did this. I’m the one who caused you all of this pain. I’m the reason why we can’t get past this; I’m the reason why we can’t find happiness.” When she finally looked back up at me, her eyes were sparkling with unshed tears.

And I knew that Margaret was right: she wasn’t able to hate me for lying to her the way I’d feared because she already hated herself more. I wrapped my arms around her protectively and stroked her back, and I thought about how much it cost to keep a secret from the person you loved more than anyone else.

“Scully,” I said gently, “you had to make that decision for both of us because I wasn’t there. I should have been there, and every day I regret that I wasn’t.” I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned my forehead against hers. “This wasn’t something you did by yourself. Everything that happened back then, both the events we chose and those beyond our control, led up to that moment. And that makes it _our_ decision. Okay?” I whispered.

She moved closer, visibly sagging against me as I felt her nod her head yes.

Encouraged that we were actually having a conversation about William, I decided to disregard Margaret’s advice, assuming that I could make Scully understand why we had to keep looking. I gently pulled back and looked down at her. “And we _can_ find happiness. Scully…” I said imploringly.

“I can’t,” she said, instantly tense. “I wish you could find a way to put that behind you.”

“But I have to do this. I _have_ to find him,” I said. I needed to put our family back together. We wouldn’t survive otherwise.

“Mulder—“

“And I can’t do it without you.” I wasn’t just talking about William anymore.

“I’m asking you not to do it all.” There was a slight edge to her voice, indicating that the conversation was over. I exhaled and nodded, and we continued to look at each other for a few more seconds until Scully walked out of the bathroom and down the hall to the guest bedroom, and I followed her.

Wordlessly, we got ready for bed and then slipped beneath the covers on our respective sides. We lay side by side for a while, both of us staring at the ceiling, until I felt Scully’s hand brush mine tentatively. After a moment, her fingers wrapped around mine and squeezed. _Are we good?_ I grasped her hand in response. _Yes._ Satisfied, she rolled over away from me, and soon I heard the soft and steady cadence of her breath that let me know she was sleeping.

I tried to sleep as well but instead recalled what Margaret had said about meeting William for the first time. It was true that it had been a happy day for all of us, but it had also been the last day I’d spent with him. If I had known I’d never get to see him grow up, if I had known it was the last time I’d ever hold him, ever kiss him, ever see him…would I have done anything differently on that last day? I felt a crushing weight on my chest and sobs rising up from my throat.

Not wanting to wake Scully with my grief, knowing it would break her if she found out, I blindly grabbed a blanket from the foot of the bed and went downstairs to the couch. There, I gave myself completely over to the pain, tears running down my face. And finally, limp with exhaustion, I could do nothing else but wait for the release that sleep would bring.


	14. Chapter 14

April 2014

 

_The mountains expand in every direction and I stand at the top of the tallest one, looking down. There are hundreds of people at the base of the mountain. They shout something over and over, but I can’t understand what they say. All at once, the yelling takes on a desperate quality; the people are afraid. I try to locate the source of their fear, but I don’t see anything._

_The crowd starts screaming as something invisible sweeps through the area, knocking them to the ground. I feel the need to do something, but I can’t see a way to get down the mountain. After watching in horror for a few minutes, an animal approaches. A half white and half brown bison nudges me gently, wanting to be petted._

_The shrieks are growing louder, but I still can’t understand what’s happening, and I don’t know how to help. I briefly consider trying to ride the bison down the mountain, but it is small, just a youth. I also can’t figure out what I would do once I got there. It seems like I’m forced to just observe, but that’s not in my nature._

_“What can I do?” I ask out loud, panicking._

_To my surprise, the bison responds. “Wake up,” it says, brushing its nose against me again. “Please, wake up.”_

“Wake up,” my mother said, shaking me. “Dana, you need to wake up.”

I sat up quickly. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, honey. I heard you yell something out and realized you were having a bad dream.”

“A nightmare,” I murmured to myself. “I’m fine, Mom. You can go back to bed.”

But my mother, already sitting on the edge of the bed, wasn’t going anywhere. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, touching my shoulder gently.

“It’s okay, I’m fine,” I insisted.

“You don’t look particularly surprised that you had a bad dream,” she observed. “Has this been happening often?”

“I’ve had a few odd dreams in the past year,” I admitted. “They haven’t all been bad, but I’ve been trying to figure out what they mean. But this latest one doesn’t seem related.”

“Why not?”

I took a deep breath and contemplated how much to tell her. “I had three previous dreams where Dad, Missy, and Emily were in each one. They were trying to tell me something, maybe the same message, but I couldn’t figure it out. But this dream felt different.

“You dreamed about Melissa?” she asked enviously. “And your father?”

“Yes, and Emily.” I gave her an overview of each of the dreams, about my father on the boat watching me imperviously as I struggled in the water, about Melissa walking beside me in a field of flowers before turning into a bird-like creature, and about Emily appearing to me as an adult on a deserted road.

“They all tried to tell me something, but I can’t seem to understand what they wanted me to learn,” I finished.

My mother studied me intently. “What makes you sure they had a message for you?”

I struggled to come up with an answer. What _had_ led me to think that these were more than just ordinary dreams about people I loved dearly? The nature of the dreams themselves? Or the importance that Sister Anne and Sophia had placed on understanding them? “I’m not sure. They just felt…I just _know_ ,” I concluded inadequately.

Surprisingly, she nodded. “You once told me that dreams are the answers to questions we haven’t learned how to ask.”

“To be fair, that’s not my quote,” I said, smiling.

“I thought as much.” She paused and then asked, “How _are_ things with Fox?”

I flushed slightly, thankful that the room was dark. My mother had to be wondering where he was. To be honest, I was wondering the same thing. I’d thought we were fine when we went to bed, but Mulder hadn’t slept on the couch since…well, since the last time we’d had a disagreement about looking for William. A cold ripple of uneasiness settled over me, even as I managed to answer my mother in a normal tone. “We’re good,” I said simply.

“Have you told him about the dreams? He would probably help you figure them out,” my mother suggested, as if she were trying to play matchmaker or couples therapist.

There was no easy way to explain to her that although Mulder no doubt _would_ want to help me, this was precisely the problem. He was incapable of offering help in the way of a few suggestions on how to go about my research. No, it was all or nothing with that man and he couldn’t help throwing himself into a project completely, letting it consume him until it was all he could see. I exhaled noisily and rubbed my temples, knowing all too well that Mulder always had to be chasing something, even if what he most often seemed to be chasing lately was the past.

My mother took in my weary sigh and glanced at the clock as if realizing for the first time that we were having a conversation in the middle of the night. But when I looked too, I saw that it was already 4:15 a.m.

“We might as well get ready for Easter Vigil,” she said, standing and heading for the door. “Meet me downstairs when you’re ready to go.”

It took me less than twenty minutes to get ready, but by the time I came down the stairs, my mother was already in the living room, watching Mulder sleep. He was curled into a ball at one end of the couch under a blanket that had partly fallen onto the floor at some point. She glanced up when she saw me enter the room. “He looks really uncomfortable,” she said with sympathy in her voice. “Maybe we should wake him up so he can move upstairs to the bed.”

“No, he’s fine,” I murmured, knowing Mulder would probably be embarrassed if he woke up to my mother peering over him. Besides, I didn’t want to have the conversation right now about why he’d moved to the couch. “Let’s go,” I said and moved to the door.

And my mother followed too, but not before she first picked up the blanket from the floor and deftly smoothed it over Mulder’s body, patting his hunched shoulders a couple of times in the process.

 

*****

 

We arrived back at the house around mid-morning, but Mulder was nowhere to be found. The blanket that he had used was neatly folded on the back of the couch, although the cushions were still flattened in an outline of where he had slept. “He probably went for a run,” I said confidently, and my mother nodded. We stood in the middle of the living room for a few moments in awkward silence until, wanting to escape the arc of her pitying gaze, I decided to go upstairs and pack so Mulder and I could leave when he returned.

Once upstairs, I threw myself into packing and then cleaning, doing more than necessary so as to help my mom but also keep my mind busy. I stripped the sheets, put them in the laundry basket, and remade the bed. Then I opened the cedar chest at the end of the bed so I could retrieve the decorative pillows, and inside, nestled underneath the pillows, I spied an old rag doll with dark hair.

I picked it up carefully and sat down on the bed, straightening the doll’s dress and hair. Maybe it had belonged to me or to Missy, or perhaps it had even been my mother’s when she was a girl. We’d had so many dolls growing up that I wasn’t surprised when I couldn’t place this particular one. It probably wouldn’t have reminded me of a different doll that Mulder had given me as a gift when I was pregnant if I hadn’t been thinking of William even more than usual, if that were possible. I turned the doll over in my hands and wondered if I’d ever be able to take the advice I gave to Mulder and put all of it behind me. But how could a mother ever stop thinking of her own child?

I remembered that the doll Mulder had given me all those years ago was a family keepsake that belonged to his mother, Teena. I knew she’d had a complicated relationship with her son, mostly because Mulder’s search for his sister had also led to his uncovering terrible truths about his parents; the things they had each done and agreed to before he and Samantha were born generated a string of events that I knew had affected Mulder his entire life. I couldn’t imagine how much it must have hurt to learn that his parents had been complicit in the plan to take Samantha and subject her to endless testing.

Staring down at the doll, I couldn’t help but notice the distinctions between Mulder’s parents’ decisions for their children and my own decision to give William up for adoption. I thought about how Mulder must have speculated through the years as to how different things might have been if his parents had been successful in resisting the men who sought to experiment on Samantha. They had tried to back out, they had tried to keep her safe, but it hadn’t worked in the end. Mulder had to have wondered if his parents could have done more to protect her. If they’d had another option, perhaps to hide Samantha from the men before they came for her, it might have still broken their family. But Mulder might never have had to learn what Samantha had been through: relentless torment that only ended with her death when she was still a child.

When I made the decision to give William up for adoption, I had only been thinking about Emily and how I didn’t want William to have to suffer her fate. It never occurred to me that Mulder, even on a subconscious level, would have had reasons apart from mine to want to make a preemptive choice that his parents had been unable to. I contemplated Mulder’s words from the night before, when he’d said that the decision had been ours rather than mine alone. I’d thought that he was simply trying to make me feel better, but now I began to believe that giving William away was a sacrifice that Mulder may have made too.

But giving up William for adoption had possibly only saved his life; it couldn’t also shield him from the legacy of who he really was. I worried that Mulder and I had unintentionally perpetuated the cycle of lies and secrets begun by his parents with our own child. Even if we had tried to make different decisions, hadn’t we also created an aura of mystery around William’s identity that was wrapped in secrets he was better off not discovering? William had no idea who he was, who his birth parents were, or why he’d been adopted. But the truth would eventually out, as Mulder’s parents discovered. So while I could try to stop Mulder from finding him, I was dreading the day that William would search for his own answers, like his father before him, and come face to face with the truths that would strip him of the innocence of his childhood.

And that was the paradox. The only way that William would ever truly understand why he’d been given up for adoption was if he learned everything that we’d had to go through. William, who I trusted was unaware that there were people capable of torturing children, knew nothing of Emily or Samantha, and I prayed that he would always remain ignorant of all of it. But even though my mind could rationally concede that he was better off never knowing us, my heart still missed him every day of his life. I would never stop wondering if there could have been a way to keep him safe _and_ keep him with me; I would never stop worrying that William assumed his birth mother had simply abandoned him, that he would never know how much I loved him.

As I was reflecting, absentmindedly stroking the doll’s hair, I sensed Mulder watching me before I looked up to see him standing in the doorway. His eyes were fixed on the doll in my hands, but he said nothing. I stared at him for a moment, wondering if the doll evoked any emotions in him as it had done for me, but his face remained impassive. “Ready?” he eventually asked, breaking the drawn out silence.

“Yes, just give me a minute,” I answered. I expected him to grab our bags and leave, but he stepped into the room and hesitated before moving to stand in front of me. His shirt was damp and his forehead glistened with sweat from his run.

“What’s that?” he finally asked, pointing at the doll.

“Nothing, just something I found in the cedar chest,” I said lightly.

He nodded and sat down next to me, close enough so that his shoulder brushed mine. “May I?” he asked, and I handed the doll over to him. I watched while turned over it in his hands, just as I had done a few moments before.

“That was a good evening, wasn’t it?” he asked, and so I knew that this doll, which really looked almost nothing like the other one, still reminded him of his long ago gift as it had done for me. And that night _had_ been good. We’d finally been reconnecting after everything that had happened since his abduction. I tried to remember if that had been the first time we’d come back together after a difficult period. And, of course, it certainly hadn’t been the last. It seemed sometimes that our whole relationship had always been in flux, like the ebb and flow of an ocean’s tide.

“It was,” I agreed.

“The calm before the storm, really.”

“Anyway, it was a good gift, Mulder,” I murmured.

“What do you think happened to that doll?”

“We had to leave it behind,” I reminded him.

“We lost a lot.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to talk to him about how I understood more about what he’d meant when he said we had both made the decision to give up William, but I hesitated. Something seemed off about the whole conversation. _Was_ he upset with me? “About last night…” I began.

“Oh, you want to apologize for being a bed hog, Scully?”

I relaxed a bit. A joking Mulder was usually a good sign, even though I could tell that wasn’t the real reason he’d spent the night on the couch. I tried again. “Mulder…” I trailed off, hoping that he would encourage me to keep talking.

But he stood up abruptly. “Come on, let’s go downstairs. Your mom is probably wondering what happened to us.” He aimed the doll at the cedar chest as if it were a basketball and took the shot. “Score!” he bragged and turned to me with a grin.

But the smile didn’t reach his eyes, which were dark and closed off, and I felt a familiar wave of helplessness wash over me that was not unlike the feeling I’d experienced in my dream that morning. This was always the first sign of him being pulled under, the first sign of the surge receding. The first sign that his demons were back.


	15. Chapter 15

August 2014

 

Every muscle in my body was burning, and every time I inhaled my lungs felt like they would explode. And then, right at the exact moment I knew I couldn’t run any further, I felt the familiar burst of new energy. Running was tricky like that: I had to trust that just when I reached the breaking point, it would somehow begin to get easier, if not easy. It was midday, hot, probably a hundred degrees with oppressive humidity, but that was exactly how I preferred it.

Familiar trees and other landmarks blurred by as I increased my pace. But I didn’t run to become faster; shaving seconds off my mile or entering races didn’t appeal to me. I also didn’t care about becoming healthier. Sure, the perks of getting in better shape were obvious, but it wasn’t the reason why I pushed my body to the limit. I didn’t even run to become stronger, as I had no need to lift bales of hay or draw water from the nearby reservoir like my nearest neighbors.

I ran because the act allowed my whole world to collapse into one singular focus: breath. It was impossible to concentrate on anything else except the sheer force of inhaling, even as my lungs felt like they were drowning. My sense of self slipped away; time itself seemed irrelevant. The more pain I felt, the more I welcomed it. I knew I was stronger than this kind of pain and could push through it.

Rounding the last curve of my usual route took me back up the winding driveway towards the house. I drank the last few drops from my water bottle and tossed it to the side as I climbed the steps to the porch. My whole body ached and tingled, and I collapsed in a wicker chair. For a few blissful moments, I sat completely still with my eyes closed, focused on nothing but my muscles as they unwound from their coils, listening only to my heartbeat slow down, no longer acting as if it were trying to escape my chest. Not music or even sleep could do what running did to bring me outside of myself. It was truly meditation in motion.

But even as I was still trying to hold on to that moment that never lasted long enough anyway, my phone began vibrating against my thigh. My eyes flew open. Dammit. With a groan, I managed to shift a bit so I could search my pockets for the buzzing offender. As I did, my phone fell out and bounced to the floor but not before I saw that it was Doggett. Just watching his name flash on the screen caused every thought I’d tried to banish to come rushing back at once.

Failure was a word that I was already well-acquainted with. Several times in the past, I’d found myself in this position, having neglected to solve something or find something or achieve something. But always before, I’d been able to pull myself back up, make a plan, and go on to the next thing. The secret, I’d figured out early on, was to keep moving, keep searching, and stay busy. If I did that, then my mind was less apt to dwell on past setbacks.

This time, though, it was harder to move on. I didn’t even know if I wanted to keep moving anymore. I couldn’t keep the nagging voice in my head from reminding me that every time I’d tried to accomplish something in the last several years, it had all ended in frustration. What if that’s all I had to look forward to? What if, no matter what I tried, it still ended the same way?

And so for months I’d been unable to figure out what to do next, and that indecisiveness felt like a thousand tiny knives in my gut. Was I supposed to actively find something to keep my mind busy? Or was I just meant to give it all up completely? I felt like I’d been given a formula with the assurance that if I followed it faithfully everything would work out, only to later realize that I was missing half of it. Like I’d been told to solve for _X_ when I couldn’t see how _X_ was even part of the equation.

The vibrations against the wooden decking were more jarring this time, and I glared at the phone. Doggett couldn’t seem to take a hint. Didn’t anyone believe in voicemail anymore? I reached down to silence the call but my legs were too unsteady, and I ended up sliding off the chair onto the ground. Finally grabbing my phone, I pushed to ignore the call and in the process somehow managed to send an automatic text message: “I’m in class.” Goddamn smart phone. I couldn’t remember why I’d let Scully talk me into getting one.

I thought about going inside, but my muscles were still tight and anyway, I was feeling a bit shaky. Since I was sitting on the floor of the porch anyway, I decided to do some stretches to loosen up a bit. I lay down, sighing in relief at how good it felt to stretch out flat, and I closed my eyes as I drew my left leg up to my chest and held it there. I repeated the action again with my right leg, savoring the feel of each muscle tensing and then relaxing.

The aching in my hamstrings had almost begun to ease when the fucking phone rang _again_. I knew it was irrational to be angry with Doggett for assuming that I was doing nothing in the middle of the day when I was, in fact, doing nothing in the middle of the day. Still, I couldn’t quite keep the annoyance out of my voice when I answered.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Mulder!” replied Doggett cheerfully. “No actual updates, but I do have a new idea. I’m working on a case right now where I had to get a list together of social workers in the—”

“Drop it,” I said shortly.

“But this could lead to the break we were looking for!”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, marveling at how just a short while ago, this would have been welcome news, but now I felt as though I’d been sucker punched. _I wish you could find a way to put this behind you._ Scully had been right to shut down my search and save me from any further disappointment. After all, if I couldn’t find anything in a year, why would I assume that five more years or hell, even ten more, might help?

“It’s not the right time,” I said flatly.

“Why? Did something happen?”

“Not really. I just need to focus on other things,” I replied.

“Scully found out, didn’t she? I told you that you needed—“

“Look, I can’t really talk right now.”

“I just want…so what are these things that you want to focus on?”

Obviously not the class I wasn’t taking. “I hear The Home Depot’s hiring,” I said, trying for levity but not quite making it there.

“Mulder…”

“Really, don’t worry about me.” Out of nowhere, my throat constricted and I hoped that Doggett hadn’t heard it.

“Okay,” he said slowly, “but I’m still going to keep looking for Monica. I’m worried about her.”

“I hope you find her,” I said with false sincerity. In truth, I didn’t hope for much right now. “Goodbye, old friend.”

I ended the call without waiting for his response and let out a deep breath. Even though I was still lying down, I felt dizzy and my head was now starting to throb. Again I heard a buzzing sound and started to get annoyed until I realized the buzzing wasn’t coming from the phone but from above. Looking up, I saw a huge hornet’s nest directly overhead, hanging from the top of the porch. I could see a few hornets swarming around and swooping in and out of the nest. As big as it was, I knew it had to have been there for a while.

Somehow, I was going to have to get rid of it. And although wasn’t excited about the prospect of angering a thousand hornets, this was at least something I could do. I could make a plan and then execute it. And the first thing on that list would be to go out to the shed and get the ladder.

 

*****

 

I opened my eyes into a cloud of confusion. I noted the sun had gone down at some point, and Scully was peering over me with concern. I had to shield my eyes from the bright porch light to see her clearly. “Jesus, Mulder,” she breathed. “Are you okay?” She went into full doctor mode, feeling my head for bruising. I swatted her hands away and struggled to sit up.

“I’m fine, Scully.”

“What happened? Did you fall?”

I remembered that I’d gone to the shed to get the ladder, but had I tried to climb it? I looked around for the ladder and then realized I hadn’t actually gone to the shed yet. I shook my head to try to clear it; I was still feeling a bit lightheaded. “No, I was running and…I guess I fell asleep.”

“It reached ninety-five degrees today, Mulder. That kind of activity in the heat can be dangerous.” Scully sighed. “You pushed yourself too hard,” she concluded.

I looked up at her, expecting to see exasperation in her expression, but instead I saw concern. “But I was okay, Scully. I was just—”

“Yes, what were you doing lying on the ground anyway, looking like…”

“Roadkill?” I supplied. But I felt a twinge of guilt, knowing what it must have been like for her to come home and see me sprawled out on the porch, unconscious.

“Something like that.” She crossed her arms and waited for my reply.

I recalled how much I’d hurt all over, much more than normal, and how shaky I’d been when trying to sit up. But I wasn’t about to tell her I’d most likely blacked out for several hours. So instead I said casually, “I was trying out a new method of meditation I’d heard about. In fact, I was almost achieving nirvana when you showed up.”

Her eyes narrowed. Humor was plainly the wrong choice, but I hated making her worry. “And I trust you weren’t drinking?”

“Nope, my drugs are all natural. Runner’s high,” I reminded her.

“Yes, that’s absolutely what this looks like,” she muttered sarcastically and then sighed again. “Let’s just go inside, Mulder. You need fluids and I need to make sure you don’t need further attention.”

“No problem, doc,” I responded. I hauled myself to my feet slowly, tacitly ignoring her offer to help.

She held the door for me, but before going in, I took one last look up at the hornet’s nest. The buzzing had stopped, and the hornets were at rest for the night. Scully followed my gaze and then gasped when she saw the nest. She looked at me with wide eyes, and I knew exactly what she was thinking: How was it possible to have missed something that was hanging over our heads for so long without either of us noticing it?

 

*****

 

About a week later, Scully and I sat on opposite sides of the couch, both of us working on our respective laptops. Well, she was working on an article to be published in a medical journal; I was aimlessly browsing news sites, just killing time until Scully went to bed. I could count on staying up for several hours after that, thanks to the insomnia that had been plaguing me lately.

I glanced over at her, noting how completely absorbed she was in her writing. Her strawberry blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was wearing her reading glasses. Every now and then, the quiet tapping of her fingernails on the keyboard would cease as she leaned over to read something on a pad of paper next to her, frowning slightly in concentration. Then, she’d resume her quick and efficient taps.

The scene was such a familiar one, going all the way back to when I’d first met her. In fact, I could almost imagine that we were working together again, possibly even writing up case reports on our latest field adventure. Even though we had frequently disagreed, at the end of the day it had always felt good to work together toward a common goal. Could it ever be possible to feel that way again?

“Feel what way again?” Scully’s voice startled me. I hadn’t realized I’d said that last sentence out loud. She raised her head to look at me as if she wanted an answer, but I didn’t want to admit that I’d been dwelling on ancient history again. So instead, I shrugged and looked away.

After a few seconds, though, I still felt her eyes on me. Looking over at her again, I saw that she was struggling with a decision. Finally, she said, “I talked to John Doggett a couple days ago.”

“Doggett called _you_?”

“He said he tried calling you several times over this past week, but your phone always went straight to voicemail, so he finally called the house.”

Making a mental note to cancel the landline, I asked warily, “What did he want?”

“Don’t worry; he told me everything,” she said pointedly. Of that I had no doubt; Doggett had always been as loyal to Scully as a rescued puppy.

“But he wanted to talk to you because…” Scully looked uncomfortable but took a breath and continued, “He’s worried about you, Mulder. He said you sounded…” This time she left the rest of the sentence unfinished, but I could fill in the blanks pretty well. _Depressed_ , I knew she didn’t want to say. _Suicidal_ , she wouldn’t bring herself to think.

A pit formed in the middle of my stomach, but I managed to scoff lightly as I explained, “I talked to him last week right before I fell asleep on the porch. You said yourself that I pushed myself too hard. He probably just picked up on how out of it I sounded, I guess.” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. If I wanted to convince Scully I was fine, I probably shouldn’t have brought up the day she found me passed out on the porch.

She pursed her lips. “Mulder, it’s not only Doggett. For the past several months, I’ve noticed a change in you too.” Her voice shook a bit, but she looked into my eyes as she talked. This had evidently been on her mind for a while.

The room suddenly felt too small, and I felt like I was suffocating. I needed air. I stood up quickly, almost knocking my laptop to the floor, and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” The frustration in her voice was evident.

For a moment I had no idea where I was going. But then I remembered something I had to take care of. “To get rid of the hornet’s nest.”

“What? No, Mulder, that’s too dangerous. We should call someone to take care of it.”

“I can handle it.”

 “Please, I don’t want you to get hurt. You should really let a professional do it,” she begged.

“I don’t need anybody’s help,” I said swiftly.

“You don’t need to do it alone, you know,” she murmured.

“Does that mean you’re planning to help me?”

“I can’t do it either. Mulder, you need—”

“I will deal with it,” I said firmly and walked out the door, letting it shut behind me with a soft bang.

The night was warm and the sky was clear. On my way to the shed, I could see thousands of stars, one of the perks of living so far from the city. Normally, I loved to look up at the stars, feeling somehow comforted by the weak light shining down on me from so far away. Well, I didn’t want to be comforted tonight, not by stars or anything else. I certainly didn’t want any pity, either. “I’m fine,” I said out loud to the starlight, daring it to contradict me. “I’ll be just fine.”


	16. Chapter 16

September 2014

 

“Agent Scully?”

I’d been on my way home after a twelve hour shift that included two difficult surgeries and had been daydreaming of a warm bath, preferably with a nice glass of wine. But those thoughts scattered as soon as I heard the unfamiliar voice behind me. I stopped cold in the middle of the hospital corridor, my body tensing in response, while I tried to remind myself that we were no longer in danger even if someone recognized my old identity.

As I slowly turned around, however, taking in the blond-haired woman in the tailored suit who stood before me, smiling, I relaxed. Leyla Harrison belonged in the “mostly harmless” category; after all, as far as I could tell, nobody had ever died from exposure to excessive enthusiasm. Yet.

“Oh my God, it _is_ you!” she squealed. “How have you been?”

“I’m fine,” I answered reflexively. “It’s good to see you again, Leyla.”

“It’s been too long! What, twelve years?” Leyla exclaimed as if we had been best friends. She stopped short of throwing her arms around me, but just barely. “I can’t believe I’m standing in front of Agent Scully!” Her smile then faltered a bit and her forehead creased. “Oh, I guess it would be Doctor Scully.”

“Dana, please.”

“Dana,” she repeated, beaming again. “I heard a rumor that you worked here, and I was hoping that I would somehow be lucky enough to run into you. I’m visiting a colleague—don’t worry, she’ll be okay—and I was just thinking how fun it would be to see you again after all of this time. How’s Agent Mulder? You’re still with him, right? I’m going to feel really stupid if you’re not.”

“Yes, I’m with him,” I answered a bit more emphatically than necessary. I was with him, it was true, but I no longer knew if he was still with me. He had been despondent for months, sinking further into himself until I could no longer reach him. Most days I felt useless, not knowing what to say or how to help. The brain was so much more complicated than the rest of the body, and although I wouldn’t think twice about setting a broken bone or even replacing an organ, there was no quick or straightforward fix for the mind. Not that Mulder thought there was anything that needed fixing in the first place.

Until his depression resurfaced in the spring, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been hoping that it would somehow be different this time around, maybe not as severe, because of how good things had been between us. I did understand that his type of depression was cyclical, and I had never been fooled into thinking that he had been cured, even on his best days. But even so, I think we had both been caught off guard by how fast and how far he’d fallen this time. Always before when he faced a downturn, I’d simply waited for him to come back to me, and eventually he always did. Each interval, however, was progressively worse as it became more difficult to reach him, and I was worried that maybe this time he wouldn’t return to himself at all.

But Leyla was talking again, and I forced myself to pay attention. “I’m really glad to hear that. I always thought you two were perfect for each other,” she was saying. “I don’t know if you heard, but I married Gabe Rotter.”

“Hmm?” I asked, searching my memory.

“You met him years ago. Dead cat?”

“Oh, that’s right,” I replied, smiling as I recalled how he’d showed up at my apartment one night at Leyla’s request with the remains of the cat in a box. “I remember he seemed like a good guy, although he wasn’t too excited about watching the autopsy I performed on my kitchen table.” I met her eyes and we both laughed. The case that Leyla had dragged me into had been disgusting yet intriguing, the way most of our work had often been.

“I loved helping out with the X-Files,” she said wistfully.

For a few moments, I allowed myself to view our work on the X-Files through Leyla’s eyes: an idealized look at a division consisting of just two agents, literally us against the world, as we searched to uncover truths that for one reason or another had been buried in secret. That’s not quite how it had been all the time, though I could acknowledge that it _had_ been worthwhile work. And to be out in the field where every day was completely different with no idea what to expect had been challenging as well as exhilarating.

But this was also true about the unexpectedness of surgery, where split-second decisions were often necessary.

“It was my dream job,” she continued. “My goal had been to gain more field experience and eventually earn a permanent position in that division. Of course, once it was shut down, I had to go with plan B. So I worked my way up to Counterintelligence,” she said proudly. “I really love it.”

“That’s great, Leyla.”

“You should come visit sometime. You know, to see your old haunts.” She raised her eyebrows in question.

“I should,” I answered noncommittally. In truth, I couldn’t imagine showing up to Headquarters for a reunion.

“I bet the old office hasn’t been touched in years; there’s probably a thick layer of dust on everything. Do you think the case files are still down there? I was just telling someone the other day about how incredible you two were in figuring out that case with the magicians who tried to pull off a bank robbery.”

“You always did remember so much about our cases. You should write it all down someday,” I suggested, thinking about the book that Mulder was never going to write.

“Me?” Leyla laughed and rolled her eyes. “That’s an intriguing idea in theory, but I’m definitely not a writer.”

“You never know—it might be fun to try out a completely different career path,” I joked.

“No way, I’m an agent for life. It does certainly seem to have worked out for you, though. Actually, I was surprised that you and Agent Mulder never came back to work for the FBI, but I guess you have a good thing going here,” she said, gesturing around at the hospital walls. “What’s Agent Mulder doing these days?”

It was a fair question, and I’d even been expecting it, but I still felt defensive. I hated that I didn’t have a good answer, and I hated feeling like I had to lie for him.

“He’s been keeping busy,” I replied evasively.

“Of course.” Leyla nodded enthusiastically. “I’d love to get together with both of you sometime. I’m sure he’s got some interesting stories to tell.”

I nodded, thinking again how unlikely that would be. We said our goodbyes, and I watched as Leyla walked confidently away from me, admiring the ever-present bounce in her step.

 

*****  


 

“You’ll never guess who I ran into today,” I said as I walked into the kitchen where Mulder was sitting at the table, his head bent down toward the laptop screen, as always. I waited a few seconds for him to respond but he didn’t seem to have heard me at all. “Mulder? _Mulder_!”

“Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, still staring at the screen. “A member of the abduction forum I joined just messaged me. A source of his has been investigating reports by multiple people of spacecraft with odd light beams that have been spotted at intervals along the Atlantic seaboard, spacecraft that doesn’t seem designed by humans. If this is true, it could mean that they’re back,” he said, giving me a significant look.

I felt a familiar stab in my gut that had nothing to do with a fear of super soldiers. Once again, Mulder would be in thrall to aliens and conspiracies, danger and intrigue. It was his siren song, and I couldn’t help but worry that one day he wouldn’t recover from the inevitable crash.

He noticed my face and sighed. “Scully, this isn’t just some rumor on the internet. What he’s saying…it fits with everything we’ve seen before. There’s something going on; I can feel it.”

“Mulder…” I said wearily. There wasn’t any point in saying anything else; this argument was so old we already knew the words by heart.  

“Forget I said anything,” he replied swiftly, avoiding my eyes. “I don’t have to respond to him.”

I sighed too and I walked to the freezer, deciding to forego a bath in favor of ice cream. Digging into the carton with a large spoon, I watched Mulder, hunched over the table and lost again in his own world. I’d wanted to bring up my conversation with Leyla as a way to draw him out and get him talking, a way we could find some common ground, something that could bring a bit of levity into our household. I wasn’t really in the mood for it anymore, but it was clearer than ever that we needed it.

“So anyway, you’ll never guess who I saw today,” I tried again, keeping my voice light.

“Probably not,” Mulder agreed, not bothering to look up.

“A real blast from the past,” I hinted.

“Flukeman?”

“Very funny. Somebody who knew a lot about me. Well, both of us, and our work.”

“The ghost of Agent Pendrell?”

“Not quite,” I replied. “Leyla Harrison.”

Mulder finally looked up with interest. “Oh yeah? That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.”

“Yes, she was absolutely thrilled to see me,” I said dryly. “She’s still our number one fan.”

Mulder smirked at that and I exhaled in relief. I’d made the right choice to mention the conversation with Leyla after all.

“So how is she?”                                                                                      

“Exactly the same,” I replied. “Bubbly, happy. She still works for the FBI, but now she’s in Counterintelligence. It seems like she’s in a really good place in her life and career.”

“I’m not surprised. She was a promising young agent back in the day, wasn’t she?” The slight edge to his voice caught me off guard.

“Yes, she was,” I said carefully. “And she worked hard to get where she is now.”

“Must have been nice not to have roadblocks in her way,” he remarked.

I could somewhat understand his bitterness. He’d also been a promising young agent, once upon a time, but things had turned out much differently for him. One could argue that he’d brought some of it upon himself by looking into the X-Files in the first place; if he’d continued on as a profiler, he’d probably still be doing that today. But even so, no matter what career path they chose, most agents didn’t have to face constant death threats or the destruction of their work the way Mulder had over the years. Most agents weren’t constantly threatened that their division would be shut down because they antagonized the wrong people. And most agents didn’t have to defend their work during a bogus trial that culminated in a run for their lives.

We had both lost so much all of those years ago, but it hadn’t affected me the same way. I’d always had a duel identity: FBI agent and medical doctor. When the one had been stripped from me, I had seamlessly fallen back on the other. Like Leyla, I’d spent the last several years on my own plan B.

But Mulder didn’t have a plan B. The X-Files had been the crux of his life’s work and everything that he’d done since, everything that he had tried to accomplish, had really been a determined attempt to get back to it again. While my new career afforded me an excuse to walk away from the fight because I didn’t want to deal with it anymore, Mulder had been cast adrift without a path to fulfill his purpose.

How many times had he told me that the search for the truth was his whole life, and that the struggle to uncover it wasn’t just something he did for a living but the way he made sense of his entire life? I’d thought I understood, but once we emerged from hiding and I started my surgical residency, I figured he would find something new to do as well. I assumed we would settle down in this house and become like every other normal couple in the world. But he hadn’t, and we didn’t.

For years, I had been waiting for him to catch up to my vision of normalcy, of happiness. I would rationalize with myself that if I just gave him time, he’d stop with the restlessness, with wanting to drop everything and chase the latest lead he found. But now I realized it wasn’t just that Mulder didn’t have a plan B; the problem was he didn’t _want_ a plan B. All this time, I thought we’d been building a life together, but he instead saw this as a temporary respite until we were able to get back to our old lives. I hated to admit it, but it was clear we didn’t want the same things and the only reason it had worked this long was because we’d been meeting each other in the middle.

It wasn’t fair to me, but it wasn’t fair to Mulder, either, of course. I’d seen the spark in his eyes just now when he talked about the email he’d received and then how it had been instantly extinguished when he saw my reaction. I knew that if I let him meet with his contact and start up a hunt for the spacecraft, it would most likely lift him out of his months-long decline. But I also knew how he’d try to drag me into doing it too, and I knew it wasn’t just going to be searching the sky for spaceships. How were we ever going to be able to avoid the darkness if Mulder kept inviting it into our lives?

I had to admit that even if I didn’t want to be dragged into the investigation, it wasn’t fair to keep him from doing it too. He shouldn’t have had to tiptoe around me, hide what he was doing or even outright lie about it. For years, I’d made him choose between me and his ubiquitous searching. He’d chosen me, as he always would, and I had held that over him. But if he couldn’t be who he was, if I kept him from doing the only thing that mattered to him, then he was either going to literally run himself into the ground or waste away at his desk.  

And so although I knew he hadn’t been talking about me when he mentioned roadblocks, it wasn’t hard for me to now see that I’d been the biggest one in his life for the past decade. How would his life be different right now if I wasn’t there to shut him down every time he suggested a new project?

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t thought of leaving before, of course, but each time I had never been able to go through it. I was always too worried about how it would affect Mulder, so I hadn’t considered that he might benefit just as much if we separated. Perhaps even more, since I was the one holding him back. But he was never going to leave me, even if he wanted to; I was absolutely sure of that. If this was going to happen, I would have to do it.

I regarded him closely, taking in his downcast eyes, his slumped shoulders. I loved him with every ounce of my mind, body, and soul and I knew that I always would. But I also knew that we couldn’t go on like this any longer. As much as it would hurt, I knew I had to do this, to give us each a chance at the respective lives we wanted to lead.

He finally noticed that I was staring at him and looked up at me. “Scully?” he asked tentatively.

“No more roadblocks,” I said quietly, more to myself than to him. I was going to fix this, I realized, feeling something akin to relief. I would set us both free.


	17. Chapter 17

October 2014

 

I was hunched over my desk at my laptop, looking over some sites that I’d bookmarked. The various news reports I’d found, stories that most of the media hadn’t bothered to tell, were all seemingly unconnected on the surface, but I had detected a pattern that I was pretty sure showed—

A disparate noise, something between a shriek and a moan followed by a metallic-sounding crash, broke my concentration.

Adrenaline shot through me, and I was up and out of my chair in less than a second, tripping over boxes stacked near the doorway of my office. Scully was in the kitchen making dinner, and as I rushed to her, a thousand possible scenarios flew through my head, all of them ranging from bad to worse, even as the rational part of my brain told me to calm down. Still, force of habit had me reaching for my nonexistent holster anyway.

When I charged into the kitchen, I found Scully bent from the waist clutching her hand. Her face was pale and drawn in pain. “What happened?” I asked anxiously.

She glanced up at my face and shook her head. “I’m fine,” she replied quickly.

But I could see blood seeping through her fingers and then noticed the chef’s knife in the sink. “You cut yourself,” I sighed. “Here, let me take a look.” I moved toward her, but she shied away from my grasp.

So instead I grabbed a dishtowel from a drawer and ran it under the faucet before handing it to her, and she accepted it without a word, wrapping it securely around her hand. We both watched as the ivory and mint colored towel slowly turned red, a small dot that steadily bloomed outward. Scully then quickly adjusted the dishtowel so a clean part of it was pressed to the wound before looking back up at me.

“Really, I’m fine,” she repeated in a voice that was clearly meant to dismiss me.

“We need to see how badly you’ve been hurt,” I insisted, and this time she reluctantly let me take her hand. Slowly, I unwound the ruined cloth and turned her fingers toward me. While I gently cleaned the blood away, I observed that she’d sliced the edge of her pointer finger on her left hand. The injury was less than an inch long and although it was still bleeding steadily, it didn’t look too deep.

“It looks okay, I think,” I offered. “Just needs more compression.” She looked too and nodded in agreement.

“I’m going to go look for bandages and antibiotic ointment,” I told her and headed to the bathroom where we kept the first aid supplies, wondering how she’d managed to cut herself like that in the first place. After spending several minutes searching the bathroom and then every other place I could think of, it was evident we didn’t have anything that would help.

As I reentered the kitchen I announced, “Sorry, no bandages. For a household with a doctor, we’re sadly unprepared for—“

I stopped short when I saw Scully. In my absence, she’d sat down at the table, with her face in her hands, trembling slightly. My heart caught at the sight. Was she in more pain than I’d thought?

“Hey,” I whispered and crouched beside her. Tipping up her chin with my fingers, I could see that she was pale and her eyes were filled with unshed tears. As soon as our eyes met, her face crumpled, and I drew her into my arms and stroked her back. “It’s okay,” I murmured, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say. This was a woman who’d faced much worse than a cut on her hand, and I couldn’t figure out why she was so distressed.

In an attempt to take her mind off of it, I murmured in her ear, “Don’t worry, I don’t care if you bled all over our food.” Scully didn’t react, though, so I tried again. “How about if I kiss it?” I whispered, nudging her playfully. “Will that make it all better?”

“No,” she answered hollowly against my chest.

That wasn’t quite the answer I’d been hoping for, but I forced myself to keep my voice light. “Well, that’s good because I didn’t want to kiss your bloody finger anyway. But maybe this will help instead.” Lowering my face down to her own, I hesitated slightly before brushing my lips softly against hers. “Are we good now?”

She looked away from me for several seconds. “Mulder,” she finally said, her voice breaking, “I’m leaving.”

For a moment, I wondered if the knife had stabbed me too. As my brain struggled to process what was happening, my first instinct was to deny, to stall. “Do you think you need to get your hand looked at?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“No…I’m…I was going to tell you tonight. I’m moving to the city.”

The confirmation was worse, a second wave of agony before I’d recovered from the first. I looked down at her and tried to reconcile the warmth of her familiar body pressed against me with the finality of her words. “What?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t want to tell you this way,” she lamented. “I thought I’d make a nice meal and then…” She trailed off while gesturing toward the counter with her uninjured hand.

Glancing over at the ingredients laid out on the cutting board, I realized she’d been making my favorite dinner to soften the blow, not unlike a last meal before an execution. It might not have been my blood on her hands, but it was starting to feel like I was slowly being put to death just the same.

Somehow, I managed to ask, “When?” It wasn’t the question I most wanted answered, but it was the only one I could handle at the moment.

“My new apartment will be ready in three days,” she answered quietly.

“So you’ve thought about this for a while,” I concluded.

“Yes.”

I supposed that she _had_ been distant these past few weeks, busy and distracted. Of course, I’d barely noticed because I barely noticed anything these days, including her. Especially her. I gently pulled her away from me so I could look at her face, and it felt like I was truly seeing her for the first time in weeks, maybe months. I didn’t need to ask why she was leaving; that was one question I could answer myself.

Her eyes filled with tears again, and my own vision blurred as the shock started to wear off and the reality of what she was saying caught up with me. “Why didn’t you say anything?” I choked out. More useless questions.

“I didn’t want you to try to talk me out of it.”

I knew she was thinking of her job offer from Seattle, and perhaps the other times during our relationship when she’d thought about walking away. I’d always managed to do or say the right thing to pull us back from the edge. Now, though, she was telling me not to try anymore, and that just like a kiss couldn’t make it all better, no amount of cute birthday gifts or Caribbean vacations could save us this time.

“How long is the lease?”

She knew what I was asking. “It’s a typical lease, Mulder. Year to year.”

So this wasn’t just a separation nor was Scully just going to her mother’s for the weekend after an argument. This was the end. At this growing realization, my chest tightened and burned, and then I felt Scully’s fingers gently brush across my face. She wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my face in her neck, needing to hold on to something that made sense.

“I’ll still come around, if you want me to,” she said after we’d clung to each other for several minutes, her voice muffled by my hair. “I’ll still be your doctor, for better or—for all intents and purposes.”

She’d been about to say “for better or worse,” so close to the standard marriage vow, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was imagining how things might have been different had we gotten married. My mind travelled back ten years to the one time we’d talked about marriage, shortly after we’d bought this house.

_“What do you think about getting married?” I asked her out of the blue one morning._

_“Is that the same as a proposal?” Scully laughed. “And who says romance is dead?”_

_“No, it’s not a proposal,” I answered offhandedly. “I just wanted to know if I should start shopping for diamonds or not.”_

_“We’re practically married anyway,” she pointed out. “All that’s missing is the piece of paper to make it official.” She grinned. “And the diamonds, of course, but that doesn’t require a white dress.”_

_“You have a point,” I agreed. “On both counts.”_

_“Besides,”_ _she joked._ _“What would you call me if we got married?”_

 _“You wouldn’t necessarily have to change your name,”_ _I answered. “But even if you did, I’d still call you ‘Scully.’”_

 _“You wouldn’t even call your wife by her first name?”_ _She asked in mock horror._

_“Why would I do that? ‘Scully’ is who you are to me. That’s who you’ll always be. Why change something that works?”_

 

That had been our answer, and so the only thing difference between our relationship and an actual marriage was the relative ease at which Scully was now able to walk away from our life together. I’d always theoretically assumed that this would be the easiest way to do it, especially after watching what my parents went through when they got divorced. This way, there were no lawyers to deal with, no papers to sign, no vows to break. But now that it was happening to us, I couldn’t help but wish I had the help of an institution to slow things down while I tried to catch my breath.

“This could be good for both of us,” she suggested tentatively. “A new start.”

I pulled back from her embrace to stare at her incredulously. In just one week I’d be turning 53, and I certainly had no desire to start over in any aspect of my life. But did she? Was I holding her back from the life she really wanted to lead?

She took a deep breath and continued, “I can’t keep standing in your way, Mulder. I can’t keep telling you not to do what you want to do.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to deny that she kept me from doing anything, but we both knew I’d be lying. So instead I said, “I never contacted that guy who emailed me about the spacecraft, Scully.”

“That’s exactly my point. You knew I didn’t want you to, so you felt like you had to drop it. But there will always be another problem to solve or a person to save, and I don’t want to keep having the same argument. This is the only person you know how to be. I have to let you be that person.”

“You were that person once, too,” I reminded her.

“I used to be a lot of things to a lot of people,” she replied, her eyes sliding away from mine.

“But when we worked together a couple years ago, searching for the super soldiers…I thought a bit of our old spark had returned, didn’t you?” I asked desperately.

She sighed. “Honestly, I felt like you didn’t give me much of a choice about working with you. You expected that I would help you because that’s what I do, and what I’ve always done. Whenever you grab on to a new crusade to save the world, it’s as if you have blinders on. I hate what it does to you, Mulder, and what it does to us.”

“It doesn’t have to be about saving the world,” I murmured.

“You’re right, it doesn’t. In fact, all of it including monsters, ghosts, and UFOs have put a stranglehold on my very existence,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Everything else in your life diminishes in importance whenever you believe that you’re on to something. And then the aftermath, the disappointment, is even worse. I know you need to do this and I respect that, but I just can’t be here to witness it,” she finished, her voice trembling.

The only reason that I’d mentioned to her that the contact had emailed me was because I thought it would be something that could bring us together, something to help us remember how good it felt to share a common purpose. I figured if we could somehow recapture that magic between us when we were on the X-Files, we could save our relationship, too. But now it sounded like she’d always hated it and that she’d never felt like we were in this together. Maybe she’d always been humoring me.

But that couldn’t have been true, could it? I had to believe that back in the day, at least, she’d been just as invested in searching for the truth as I was. In fact, she was often the one who encouraged me to keep going, even during those times when I’d assumed everything had been lost. I couldn’t remember her complaining about the all-consuming nature of our work nor the disappointment back then. Surely she had been equally as passionate about our work. Everything I’d ever known about her and our relationship came down to my need to believe in that.

“But what about before? The X-Files?” I asked, trying and failing to put into words all of the jumbled emotions I was feeling.

“Forget the X-Files,” she said wearily. “That was a long time ago, Mulder. We have to live our lives where they are right now.”

And right now, she was leaving me. Searching her eyes, I saw that they were imprinted with pain and sadness. I recalled her looking exactly the same way on another October evening a year ago, when I’d tried to invoke a happy memory from our shared past by singing to her, only I’d ended up hurting her instead. I’d hurt her a thousand times over the years that I was aware of and a thousand more that I apparently wasn’t. She’d always assured me, though, in the face of the guilt I continued to carry with me that she still would have chosen to do it. She still would have chosen to be with me. But somewhere along the line, the scales had tipped in the other direction, and the burden of staying with me had become too much for her.

“I have to go,” I mumbled, standing up. My legs were asleep from kneeling by her chair for so long, and I stumbled a bit as I tried to leave. “I need to get something for your hand,” I said, indicating the bloody towel she was still clutching. I rushed out of the house and got into the car—her car—and drove away.

 

*****  
  
  
I’d come to the store mostly as an excuse to sort out my thoughts, but now as I stood in the first aid aisle, I realized that this might be the last thing I ever did for Scully. This mundane act of running to the store to buy something that she needed, that simple act of domestic life—that’s when it hit me that I’d lost her. That I’d spent almost half my life in tandem with hers, whether in a professional or personal capacity, and it had all come to an abrupt end.

With dismay, I realized I was going to break down in the middle of the store, so of course an employee came around the corner at that exact moment. He opened his mouth, presumably to ask if I was finding everything I needed, and then closed it without a word once he saw my face. He looked down at the package of Band-Aids in my hand but mercifully refrained from stating what was painfully clear: that I needed something a hell of a lot stronger than Band-Aids to fix whatever was wrong with me.

The employee quickly backed away without a word and once again, I was left alone in the aisle with my thoughts. I couldn’t stop thinking of the conversation, trying to make sense of it. _Forget the X-Files_ , Scully had told me. _Forget William. Forget us_. She kept asking me to give up on everything that had ever made our lives worth it, and I couldn’t understand why she insisted on running relentlessly toward a future without anything good in it.

Well, she might have wanted to run away from it all but I couldn’t, any more than I could ever forget anything that had happened in our shared history. But it seemed that was exactly what she intended to do with her “new start” as she’d put it. I sighed and grabbed a package of antibacterial ointment off the shelf and began walking to the front of the store. On the way, I passed the photo center and paused, thinking of the picture in my wallet that I carried with me, always.

That picture was all Scully and I had left of William, and he was the only tangible proof that our relationship had ever existed outside of ourselves. I circled back to the photo center and pulled out the well-loved picture. I’d been wrong before; there was one last thing that I could do for Scully.

I watched as the machine created an identical snapshot of our son, thinking about how fitting it was that even if everything else between us was ending, we could still share this. For better or worse, we would always be linked through our son, even if we hadn’t been through marriage, and this was one small way I could remind her of that.


	18. Chapter 18

October 2014

 

The alarm on my phone went off at 5:30 AM, and after silencing it I automatically reached for my lamp before remembering that it was gone. I’d already packed it, along with most of my other belongings. Today was moving day.

I turned over and wrapped the blankets more tightly around my body, allowing myself a few more minutes before I had to face the morning. And Mulder. Although I’d briefly considered slipping out the door before he woke up, I knew I owed it to him to say one final goodbye, no matter how much I dreaded it.  

We’d been saying goodbye in several smaller ways over the past few days, like when he’d caught me filling out address forwarding cards or when I’d asked him to carry some heavier boxes to my car. I had tried to stay busy with work and packing, but there weren’t enough small tasks in the world to conceal the new tension between us. I hadn’t been avoiding him, not exactly, but I could sense that he had something to say to me, and I wasn’t ready to hear it.

I forced myself out of bed, turned on the shower and got in, standing still for several moments with my eyes closed as I listened to the familiar groaning of the pipes. This was an old house, and I remembered that back when we first bought it, I wondered if I’d ever get used to the change of pace in such a rural area. Back when we’d talked about where to settle, when it seemed safe enough to stop living out of motels, Mulder had simply wanted a secluded area so he could continue keeping a low profile while I’d imagined a real house with a yard for flowers. The compromise had been an easy one, as so many things were back then, and over time I’d come to love making this house our own.  

Buying the house had been the one thing we’d done as a traditional couple, and it remained the one thing that equally belonged to both of us. We’d made the down payment with a portion of the money Mulder had inherited from his parents’ estate once their house on the Vineyard had sold, and I’d been making the payments ever since. Thus, it was also the last thing we needed to figure out how to divide. I knew why I hadn’t brought it up yet, and I suspected Mulder felt the same: it would make our breakup real in a way that nothing else yet had. After all, it was still possible for me to change my mind and come back home, but that was only true until this wasn’t my home anymore.

If circumstances had been different and he was the one moving out, I wouldn’t have been able to live here without him. Selfishly, though, I wanted him to keep the house, even though it would make more sense for him to get a smaller place as well. Either way, I knew we’d have to do some sort of a buyout and then complete the necessary paperwork to remove my name from the title. I sighed and scrubbed shampoo into my scalp, wishing I could also wash these thoughts from my head. Just like unpacking from a trip, endings were always messier than their beginnings.

After I finished getting ready, I gathered up the last of my possessions and took one last look around the bedroom. It didn’t seem quite real to me yet that I’d never sleep here again. I turned off the light with a sigh and then sidled softly down the stairs, avoiding the second one from the bottom for the telltale creak. With more than a little trepidation, I carefully made my way across the living room to the couch where Mulder lay.

My eyes hadn’t adjusted yet so I could barely make out his form, but I could imagine him perfectly: how his body would be casually draped across the cushions with his legs hanging off the end, how his face would be peaceful in slumber with scant sign of the stress he carried around daily. I knew every inch of his body as well as I knew my own, and as it often happened, the darkness allowed us to see each other more clearly.

“Mulder.”

My voice was too loud in contrast to the silence of the early morning, and Mulder startled in surprise. His eyes glittered in the dim light as they searched for mine. “Hey,” he said after a moment.  

“It’s morning,” I responded inadequately.

I heard the leather couch shift and then a lamp flickered on. Suddenly, he stood in front of me, and I instinctively shrank back a little. We faced each other for a few moments in awkward silence, and it occurred to me that perhaps I’d been anxious about this moment for the wrong reasons.

To cover up my discomfort, I began talking quickly. “Don’t forget that the propane bill is due by the 20th and the grocery delivery service is on the 22nd. You’ll need to finalize your order twenty-four hours in advance. Oh, and your dentist appointment information is on the fridge.”

Mulder’s lips curled halfway into the playful grin I loved so much and he replied, “You know, I have lived alone before.”

“I remember,” I murmured.

But that had been a lifetime ago, and everything had changed since then. I forced myself to look up at him and immediately wished I hadn’t. His eyes were warm and soft, reminding me that we were so close, still close to each other, just inches of space between us. In two short strides I could have stepped back into his embrace, feeling his arms wrap around me. The temptation was overwhelming, and I had to mentally remind myself why I was leaving.

I licked my lips, an obvious sign of my apprehension, and Mulder stepped forward so that we were almost touching. “Scully,” he whispered. A single, jagged note of agony and desire.

“I have to go,” I said more harshly than I’d intended.

Turning away from him quickly, I reached for the door but didn’t immediately open it. Before I left, I couldn’t help but glance back one more time. He had to be remembering the promise we’d made to each other. That I’d keep trying as long as he did. That he wouldn’t give up as long I didn’t. As I reluctantly met his gaze, I expected accusations on his lips, disappointment in his eyes. But Mulder instead seemed resigned, resolved.

“Wait, I have something,” he said, his voice newly crisp with purpose as he reached for his wallet on the coffee table.

With horror, I realized that he wanted to settle the issue of the house at this very moment, and all of the tears that I’d managed to keep inside since I’d woken up this morning threatened to spill over at once.

“Mulder, I can’t right now,” I choked out.

He froze at my words and, looking at my face, slowly returned the wallet to the table. “Okay,” he said simply, his shoulders slumping a little.

“The apartment manager is expecting me at eight,” I mumbled in excuse.

He pursed his lips together and nodded. “Goodbye, Scully.”

“Goodbye, Mulder,” I replied softly.

After a brief pause, he leaned in towards me, but at the last moment I turned my head slightly so instead we ended up cheek kissing in a French-like farewell.

And then it was over, with Mulder closing the door while I walked down the porch steps to my car. But once I was behind the steering wheel, I couldn’t seem to make myself leave. I looked up again at the house, imagining that he was watching me through the window although it was still too dark to tell. I squeezed my eyes shut briefly, sending a prayer that he’d come to understand why I had to do this.

I slowly turned the car around, heading down the long, winding driveway and onto the familiar roads that led into the city. And as the skyline came into view, I tried it out in my head: _home. You’re almost home._ But home still meant two acres of land in Virginia. Home meant an impossibly stubborn and brilliant man who was searching for a reason to save the world.

 

*****  
  
  
A few days later, I was still unpacking and still thinking of Mulder. Several times I’d thought about calling him, but we had to give each other time to move on. Surely, though, it would be all right if I called him today.

I stood up from the box of dishware I’d been unpacking in the kitchen and stretched my cramped muscles. Settling back into a chair, I let my mind wander to where it had been a thousand times already. Since it was early afternoon, Mulder was probably sitting in his office, looking for connections to whatever conspiracy du jour had attracted his attention. I imagined him in his favorite gray t-shirt and a pair of jeans, drinking coffee out of his Roswell Rocks mug, perhaps.

My hand grazed my phone, and with sudden resolve, I clicked his name before I could rethink it. The call went straight to voicemail, though, and I exhaled with relief as I ended the call without leaving a message.

I opened up the messaging app instead. _Hi!_ I tapped out. _Just wanted to say…_ I rolled my eyes and hit the back button. Tried again. _Happy birthday, Mulder. Hope you’re having a good day._ But I was pretty sure he wasn’t having a good day, so I erased that as well. _Happy birthday!_ _J_ After deleting the smiley and then, after a moment of consideration, the exclamation point as well, I sent the message with a sigh.

Knowing I couldn’t sit all day with my phone in my hand, waiting for a reply, I wandered downstairs to the very modern-looking lobby to check my mailbox. Surprisingly, I had quite a bit of mail, although it was likely all junk. But before I could rifle through it, I heard somebody enter the room.

“Hi there, neighbor,” said a friendly voice behind me. I whirled around just as a petite woman with the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen was closing her own mailbox. “I saw you a few days ago, and I think you live on my floor. Did you just move in?”

“Yes,” I answered, returning her smile. “But I’m not new to the area. I’ve worked in DC for years, and I used to live in Georgetown a long time ago.”

“Well, you’ll love it here. I’m Caroline Shaw, by the way,” she continued, walking up to me and sticking out her hand so I could shake it. “I’ve lived in this building for a couple years, and it’s very quiet, mostly single professional women.”

“I’m Dana Scully,” I said. “I’m a pediatric surgeon at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital.” Single and professional, indeed.

“Oh, we’re practically work neighbors, too,” Caroline exclaimed. “My office is right down the road in the new mental health facility. I’m technically a clinical psychotherapist, but most of my patients would probably just refer to me as a dream hypnotist,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh.

I couldn’t do anything but stare at her for a few moments. This had to be more than just a coincidence. It couldn’t be an accident that almost everyone I had met since I’d started having strange dreams was connected in some way with dream interpretation. It was almost like someone or something was trying to get me to pay attention. As if they were sending some kind of a sign.

Caroline began talking about her favorite restaurants in the neighborhood, and I only half-listened as I thought back to the first time I believed I’d received a sign. It had been years ago, when Mulder and I had been doing as much flirting as working on our cases together. I remembered that I’d been unsure about entering into a relationship with him, not knowing whether we had a true connection or if we were only attracted to each other out of convenience and familiarity.

I had been so upset and confused that finally, out of desperation, I’d asked Missy to send me a sign, knowing she would have loved that sort of thing. I wanted her to show me something that would let me know if I was supposed to be with Mulder. And then later that same day, in a coincidence at least as unlikely as this one, I’d run into my old mentor and lover, Daniel Waterston. Through my interactions with him, as well as the visions I’d received at a Buddhist temple, I realized that I belonged with Mulder.

As I reflected back to that moment, I could almost feel that sense of conviction again that had washed over me as I’d knelt in front of the statue and watched with closed eyes as my whole life appeared before me. Everything had seemed so clear that day, and I’d understood how every choice I’d made had brought me closer to Mulder and what I’d assumed at the time had been our happy ending, once we finally got together. But I’d made so many more choices since that day, and I was no longer sure that any of them were correct. What was I supposed to be moving towards now? It was as if I were in a maze, not knowing which way to turn to get back on track, and I wished for even a small bit of the certainty I’d felt when I walked out of that shrine.

Did any of this mean that Mulder was the reason for my unsettling dreams? Had they been warning me about the end of our relationship? But that just didn’t feel right to me, not the least because I’d been the one to leave. Each one of my dreams had seemed to signal something of urgency, something that I needed to pay attention to. A feeling of unease gripped me. What were the dreams trying to tell me? It seemed like they should have been pointing me towards something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Vaguely, I realized that Caroline had stopped talking and was waiting for a reply. I tried to answer her, but at that moment, the room tilted and my knees seemed to give way. The feeling of uneasiness turned abruptly to lightheadedness, and I blinked a couple of times to try to clear my vision.

“Dana, are you okay?” Caroline asked in alarm. She took a step toward me uncertainly.

“Yes, I just need… Give me a second,” I breathed.

I reached for the wall to steady myself, and the stack of mail I’d been holding tumbled out of my hands. As I leaned down to scoop the papers from the floor, I noticed that one of the envelopes was addressed to me in familiar handwriting. My head suddenly and inexplicably cleared but new questions now clouded my mind.

Forgetting the rest of my mail on the ground, I tossed a quick goodbye and an apology to Caroline over my shoulder and rushed from the lobby straight upstairs to my apartment, my heart pounding the entire way. Was it a letter? Something to do with the house? What would Mulder have sent me in the mail that he couldn’t tell me over the phone?

As soon as I shut the door behind me, I eagerly tore into the envelope, leaving shreds of it all over the floor. I tipped it open onto the table, and a single piece of paper fluttered out. On second glance, though, I realized it wasn’t paper at all. Picking it up carefully between my thumb and forefinger, I hesitated just slightly before flipping the photograph over so I could see my son’s small face.

Sitting down heavily at the kitchen table, I stared at William, acutely remembering why I always shied away from looking at this picture. _He’s on my lap in a small, hot room._ I swallowed that memory away and forced myself instead to get lost in the memory of the day I’d taken the picture. I closed my eyes and remembered how he laughed as I pointed the camera at him; it was a sound I would never forget. _William bounces up and down and begins yelling “Da-da-da-da-da!” I wonder if he’s asking where Mulder is. I wonder if he’ll soon want to know where I am too._

Shaking my head, I exhaled slowly and recollected that I’d taken the picture to mark William’s 6th month. My mother had even brought over a cake to celebrate his half birthday. _William squirms around and tugs at my necklace; he’s always been fascinated by it. The social worker says, “You can let him have it, if you want. It’s pretty common for the birth mother to give something to the child as a memento he can treasure as he grows up.”_ I couldn’t remember what flavor cake my mom had baked, but of course I recalled why I couldn’t give my son anything that might have linked me to him.

The photo dropped from my hands. I tried not to think about how I had finally handed my baby over to a woman whose name I would never know. I couldn’t allow myself to remember how William had reached for me as I’d turned away, not wanting him to see my tears. How he’d started crying as I looked back at him one more time and saw my grief mirrored in his own blue eyes. How I’d made myself walk out the door only to stand on the other side, sobbing, wishing Mulder were there with me but at the same time thankful he wasn’t.

He returned it to me, I realized. Mailing the photo was Mulder’s way of letting me know that he’d officially given up the search for William. I was sure he assumed I’d be pleased by the news, but I had watched him carry that picture of his son around with him every day. Constantly looking at it, touching it. My lungs constricted and despair swept over me as though I were back in that small room all over again. Only now did I see how much Mulder’s hope sustained me too. Only now did I understand how much it meant to me that he cared enough to search for his son.  

“I need to believe that you won’t give up on us,” I whispered out loud. It wasn’t fair at all, but I had to know if he was still fighting for his family.

The only reply was the resounding silence of my phone, though, which didn’t chime once the whole evening. I already had my answer.


	19. Chapter 19

August 2015

 

I daydreamed about her all the time.

In one recurring reverie, I’d imagine I was sick; perhaps it was the flu, or sometimes I pretended I had pneumonia, but either way it left me too weak to get up. Even though I never called her in any of these dreams, Scully would somehow know I needed her anyway. She’d arrive with a sense of purpose and compassion, feeding me broth and giving me several sponge baths. As my health returned, we’d start talking about what we missed about each other, and she’d invariably realize that she never should have left in the first place.

Another one of my favorite daydreams involved Scully having some sort of crisis and coming over in the middle of the night for comfort. I’d picture her silently entering the house and hesitating, wondering whether to wake me or not. After a moment, she’d make her way upstairs to watch me sleep for a while. Maybe I’d wake up at that moment and pull her into bed with me; other times, I’d imagine her slipping in beside me, curling her body around mine, whispering into the space between my shoulder blades that everything was okay now that she was home.

There were several more scenarios, all with minor variations, but they all featured the same theme: Scully walking back through the door for good. I knew what a slim chance that was, and with each passing month, the possibility became more remote. But still, I waited. Patience had never been my forte, and I remembered how often I used to count the hours until Scully got home from work, how those days had always seemed to last an eternity. But I hadn’t truly understood the concept until those hours began stretching into weeks and months with no end game in sight.

Ironically, I was hitting the age where most people realized they were running out of time, so they tried to fill it with everything they’d put off until later. Midlife crisis, they called it. And maybe I was having one too, but for the opposite reason: never before had I felt like there was too much life left to live and not enough distractions to help it go by faster.

I just didn’t have much to do these days since I’d given up talking to contacts who tracked suspicious government activity or researched underground networks. Their emails went straight into the recycle bin; what’s more, I was making a conscious effort to stay off the internet altogether. Although it was becoming clear that sinister forces loomed on the horizon, I had become quite adept at ignoring all of that simply because it’s what Scully wanted. I hadn’t even started searching for William again; that’s how committed I was to proving that I was a new and enhanced person: Mulder 2.0. Well, technically, I’d simply delegated the tasks elsewhere, but it still counted.

So my choice of activities had narrowed to daydreaming or thinking. Thinking, though, usually led to obsessing about why and how it had all gone wrong, which wasn’t the healthiest hobby in the world. All the same, it was hard to resist replaying events in my head, even reaching way back into the recesses of my memory to see if I could discern one instant, a single point in time, where Scully and I had stopped viewing the world through a single lens. Once I discovered that, I reasoned I’d be at least one step closer to figuring out how to fix this. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t seem to find a single decisive moment that might have set the dominos in motion.

We’d always had our differences, sure. In a lot of ways, we were even opposites: evidence and intuition; deliberation and spontaneity. Skeptic and believer. But always before, in all the ways that mattered, we’d been on the same page. Somewhere, though, we’d ended up in entirely different books, and now I wouldn’t have been able to tell her side of the story if I tried.

Of course, I had attempted to tell her story, once upon a time. _Our_ story. Not that I could remember exactly how much of it I’d written. Impulsively, I sat down at the kitchen table and opened my laptop. After a quick search, I found what I was looking for: a document titled “XFilesMemoir.” Hovering over the icon, I noticed that it had been last modified on April 14, 2013. Over two years ago. Scully had been the one who wanted me to write a book; she thought it would give me a new purpose, something to take my mind off of the fact that I’d failed in my latest project. Well, this was one more failure I could add to the pile. I’d never finished the book, assuming memoirs were something people wrote at the end of their lives when they were washed up. I hadn’t believed I was done just yet.

Even during my darkest hours, I had always clung to the idea that somehow Scully and I would find our way back again. I’d reasoned that surely we had a few more chapters of material left in us. From the distance of two years, though, that seemed ridiculous now. Perhaps she had been right, maybe it really was all over. It was time to stop daydreaming. Time to get on with my life. How many times was that truth going to have to slam up against me before I began to believe it?

I exhaled noisily and clicked on the file, staring at the single line on the screen once it popped up: “I fell for her the moment she walked through the door.” I’d typed that on a silly whim, so lighthearted I’d been that day. But now, it struck me as a sinister warning. In my all of my attempts to identify the point where everything had started to unravel, I’d never thought to return to the day we met. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured her as she had been: fresh-faced and carefree, offering a quick grin to mask her nervousness at meeting her new partner. Had she ever smiled that easily again? That was a question I didn’t want to answer. Opening my eyes, I leaned back in my chair and again contemplated the meager beginning of my memoir. I’d always believed that fate must have brought us together, but then, fate was a neutral concept; it wasn’t always positive. Maybe from that first handshake, the hourglass had begun to fill.

Even a few months ago, I would have laughed at this idea, but now it gave me pause. Our current relationship, such as it was, had been downgraded to a persistent vegetative state, kept somewhat alive by routine medical intervention, which in our case meant monthly phone calls. Scully might have thought she was being subtle by acting friendly and asking about my life during these chats, but I hadn’t lived with a doctor for more than a decade without picking up on a few tricks. These scheduled exchanges were her way of screening me over the phone to make sure she didn’t have to worry, as if the only connection that still existed between us was a Hippocratic one. _First, do no harm…_

Still, when I saw her name flash on my phone, I felt it again, a pang of optimism I couldn’t quite squelch no matter how hard I tried. The anticipation that somehow, it would be different this time. That Scully might be calling to tell me how stupid she’d been. That we might have a real conversation again.

“Mulder.”

“Hey, it’s me,” she said, her voice an octave too high, and I felt my whole body spasm as three seconds of hope dissipated painfully.

“Hi,” I responded flatly.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I said automatically. And then, because I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with that answer, I added, “I finally got around to starting _Wuthering Heights_.”

“Great!” Scully enthused.

“And how are you?” I asked, only because I knew she wanted me to.

As she chattered about her job and some people she’d met, I tried to picture Scully at her place in DC. But it was difficult to imagine her in an apartment I’d never been to, sitting on furniture I’d never seen. I wondered if I’d even recognize the clothes she was wearing.

She trailed off after a few minutes, leaving a space that I was supposed to fill, the normal conventions of a tête-à-tête. But did she really expect me to say ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying your life’?

After letting the pause linger uncomfortably for a few more seconds, Scully got down to business. “How are you sleeping?”

“More or less the same,” I replied offhandedly.

“Did you ever start a garden like you mentioned a while back?”

“Nope.”

“The weather’s been really nice. Have you had the chance to get outside lately?”

“A little,” I sighed.

“That’s good,” she murmured. “Anything new going on?”

This was the part where I was supposed to make a joke, to let her know that I was fine, to let her off the hook. But after almost a year of this, I was tired of playing the fool in her romantic tragedy. “Nothing’s changed since last month,” I answered shortly. “Was there anything else you needed?”

“Mulder…” She sounded weary. Sad, even. But that didn’t make sense, not when she could have stopped this at any time. Just a few words could have changed everything, and she knew it as well as I did.

“Actually, there is something new. I found the memoir I started writing a couple years ago. You know, the one about our work? Now that it’s _over_ ,” I said, not bothering to disguise the bitterness in my voice, “I figured it’s the perfect time to write a book.”

Another pause, but this time the silence felt alive, crackling between us as if it were a third member of our discussion. I half-expected her to pretend I hadn’t said anything so she could continue to quiz me.

But she said, “I have to admit I’m a bit surprised that you haven’t started working again.”

“What?” For a moment I wondered if this was supposed to be a trick question. Why would I have continued working when that was precisely what had pushed her away in the first place?

“Maybe you should think about following up on some of your leads,” she continued quietly.

“My leads,” I repeated dimly.

“Yes, it might turn out to be, um, a good thing for you.”

The weight of her words settled on my chest, my lungs, making it hard to draw in a breath. “Which ones?” I managed.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you have a particular theory you wanted me to look into? Or is this more like ‘take two aspirin, chase some aliens, and call me in the morning’?”

“I don’t understand, Mulder,” she said slowly.

No, she didn’t. She didn’t understand at all. Something wrenched loose in my body and I felt myself crack apart, creating a chasm that forced me to one side while Scully remained on the other. She tried to speak, tried to call out to me across the divide, but I couldn’t hear what she said; her voice was faint and tinny. She was speaking another language, she was too far away, and I clicked end on the phone, letting it drop to the floor.

This didn’t matter to her. It didn’t matter what I did, what theory I pursued, as long as I pursued one. I could be tilting at windmills for all she cared, for all she was interested in the outcomes. This was nothing more than a diversion from what really mattered to her. Something that she could easily pick up and then leave off of at any time.

I’d always believed that this had been bigger than ourselves, and we were supposed to be in it for good. For the truth. I stared at my laptop and tried to make sense of it even but everything blurred before me. She didn’t feel the same way. Maybe she’d never felt the same way.

Heat flooded my face and traveled down my body as if it had caught fire. I had to get out of this place. Go outside, go anywhere else and turn my mind off. I stood up blindly, so hard and fast that the chair violently tipped backward. A resounding crack echoed through the kitchen, and it took me a moment to realize that one of the chair legs had split almost in two.

“Shit,” I muttered. Of course that had to happen. Without thinking, I reached down and ripped the broken piece right off the chair so that it tipped precariously. Staring for a moment at the piece of wood in my hand, adrenaline inexplicably exploded through me.  

Seizing the chair, I tore at another leg, pulling with a grunt until it too gave way, emitting another satisfying crack. My pulse quickened as I bent the pieces over my thigh again and again, forcing the wood to give until I felt welts begin to rise, daring my bones to shatter instead. The wood crumbled like kindling in my scratched and raw hands, and when I could no longer shred the pieces into smaller ones, I tossed them aside.

I grabbed the rest of the chair, smashing it on the ground until the seat separated from the back. My muscles shook and sweat poured from my forehead until my whole face was slick and I couldn’t see. I yanked at the wood, pounded and slammed my fists into that chair, maybe for minutes or hours, until I felt worse than it looked. Finally, I sank into another chair, ribcage heaving, silently acquiescing that some things couldn’t be broken.

My pulse still pounding in my ears, I examined the blisters already forming on my fingers. I’d heard about people who punched holes in their walls when they were pissed, and I’d never understood that mentality before. But now that I felt it, every throbbing part of my body, I knew that at least this pain I could catalog.

Wheezing painfully, I pulled the laptop over so it was in front of me, still open to that damn document. I stared at it until the words came into focus again: “I fell for with her the moment she walked into the room.” How could I write the rest of it? Two stories, irrevocably untangling. My finger briefly hovered over the Backspace key, but I couldn’t erase it. After a moment, I added, “The End.” Because maybe the world had ended after all, just not on time.

I sighed and clicked the “X” at the top to exit out of the file. A message popped up: “Do you want to quit without saving?”

Skeptic or believer; deliberation or spontaneity; fire or ice.

Yes or no.


	20. Chapter 20

October 2015

 

As the first explosion vibrated across my hands and then up through my arms, I paused briefly at the familiar rush. Shoulders squared, I emptied the rest of the magazine in rapid succession, only slightly surprised that a Glock 22 would still feel so natural in my hands despite the fact it had been years since I’d last fired a gun.  

It was more surprising that I was allowed to do this at all. How many people could just walk into the training center at Quantico and start shooting at targets? I knew I wasn’t just anyone, of course, but nevertheless I’d been taken aback by how many people still remembered me here.

I lowered the weapon and pulled off my safety glasses as the firearms and tactics training specialist walked out of the booth and over to the board. “You’ve still got it,” he called out admiringly. “Remarkable accuracy in all four sequences. Practically perfect.”

“In every way,” Leyla Harrison added with a grin, walking up behind me.

I rolled my eyes as I removed the protective earmuffs, but I was secretly pleased with the results. Ever since I’d first picked up a gun as a child, always trying to keep up with my brothers, I’d prided myself on being a good shot.

The trainer returned to the booth and tapped a keyboard a couple times. “It’s better than your last attempt,” he noted, peering at the computer monitor.

“My last attempt?” I echoed, following him into the small space.

“Yes, you’re still the system, see?” he explained, turning the screen towards me. “After all, who’s going to bother clearing out old employee records? This _is_ the government we’re talking about.”

“You should log her results,” Leyla suggested.

“For what purpose?” I protested, eyeing my stats.

With a shrug and a smile, she pointedly strapped on her glasses and sauntered off before I could say anything else. The trainer dutifully entered my score into the database as I sighed and turned to watch Leyla shoot.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing here in the first place. This morning, I’d woken up to an unusual day off since Sister Mary, my supervisor, had been appalled when she realized I had been working close to a hundred hours a week, taking on much more than my share of twenty-four-hour shifts. She’d immediately ordered me to take a personal day, preferably two.

I complied only because nobody ever argued with Sister Mary, and I’d even tried to look forward to a day of rest. But somewhere between organizing the shoes in my closet and flossing my teeth it became obvious that I had to find a better way to fill the rest of the hours that stretched before me. Even so, I couldn’t have explained what compelled me to fish an old business card out of my bag and call Leyla.

I’d heard the shock and joy in her voice when I asked if she could meet for lunch and regretted not calling her before this. Since she couldn’t do lunch because she was due to update her firearms training today, she’d asked if I wanted to come with her and visit the campus for old times’ sake. Leyla was nothing if not persistent. And that’s how this surgeon found herself on a chance Tuesday afternoon in late October with a loaded gun in hand, emptying clips into various types of targets.

As Leyla finished her requisite sixty rounds with a standard-issue weapon, the trainer turned to me and asked, “Want to try the G27 next?”

“No, that’s okay, I don’t wear a backup,” I answered automatically and then grimaced, glad that Leyla was out of earshot. No doubt she would have made too much out of how effortless it was for me to slip back into this mode, almost as if I’d never left.

Once Leyla finished, we headed back to the city. I was content to relax into the seat while she drove, letting the easy cadences of her conversation wash over me. For a good portion of the ride, she kept up a steady stream of chatter, beginning with the weather and then progressing to a litany of good-natured complaints about her two boys, relaying how her seven-year-old wanted to be Captain America for Halloween while her five-year-old was determined to trick-or-treat as Elsa. Her entire demeanor, from the way her eyes lit up to the fondness in her voice, revealed how much she adored her children.

My stomach did its usual thing when people mentioned their kids, but I wasn’t jealous of Leyla. Nonetheless, it took everything in me not to react like Mulder, not to let the resentment overtake me. She was a reminder of all the things I’d once had and done and been, and being around her both fascinated and repelled me.

Even though I was pretty sure none of these reflections showed on my face, Leyla stopped mid-sentence and glanced over at me in concern. I tried to smile reassuringly, but the mood in the car had already shifted.

“I’m sorry, Dana,” she said awkwardly.

“It’s okay, really,” I said. And I meant it. She didn’t need to feel like she couldn’t talk about her kids just because of my situation, which I was sure she’d heard all about. I’d never discussed William with her, but gossip ran rampant in every workplace. She was still looking like she’d accidentally run over my dog, so I continued lightly, “Your children sound wonderful, Leyla. I don’t live very far from you, so I’ll have to come over and meet them sometime.”

I immediately regretted using singular pronouns, and from the way Leyla furrowed her eyebrows I knew she hadn’t missed it either. I’d been purposely vague about my location when I agreed to meet at her place earlier in the day, but now there was no way to avoid the inevitable question that followed.

“So, you live in DC now?”

“Yes, an apartment in the upper northwest,” I replied.

“That’s a nice neighborhood. I’m sure you like living a lot closer to your job,” she remarked, and I exhaled slowly, grateful to her for tacitly letting me know that we didn’t have to talk about him if I didn’t want to.

Leyla had asked about Mulder on the way down to Quantico, which I’d been prepared for, and I had answered briskly enough that she’d gotten the hint and changed the subject. It’s not that I necessarily felt the need to hide my private life from her, and as an investigator she could have easily found out anything she wanted about me anyway. I simply didn’t have the heart to disappoint her.

But then again, I also didn’t want her trying to guess what had happened; she seemed like just the sort of person who would obsess over worst-case scenarios. That, along with the fact that she still wore a guilty and embarrassed look on her face, led me to a split-second decision to just come out with it.

“I’ve been back here for a year now, but Mulder still lives out in the country,” I stated matter-of-factly.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and I nodded in acknowledgement. “I always thought you two…” she broke off.

She’d always thought we were perfect together. The perfect couple. I was shattering her illusion, and it felt as horrible as I’d imagined it would.

“Sometimes things aren’t the way they seem on the outside,” I whispered, almost to myself.

Turning away from her, I focused my gaze outside on the familiar landmarks rushing past. I hadn’t spoken to Mulder in over two months, not since our last conversation had ended with him hanging up on me. For weeks after, I had tried calling him repeatedly, listening to the phone ring and ring until my calls eventually started going straight to voicemail. In desperation, I’d contacted our neighbor, Mr. McIlroy, and asked if he would keep an eye out for Mulder, instructing him to call me if he hadn’t seen him in the yard or out running for more than three days straight. It was a bit morbid, I knew, but there wasn’t much else I could do. I constantly debated whether I should go over there myself, but I couldn’t bear the thought that there was a good chance Mulder wouldn’t want to see me. That he might not even let me into our house.

These were things Leyla didn’t need to know. I looked over at her again and wondered if she’d ever worried that her husband had lost his way, or if she had ever felt like the very foundation of their relationship had been built within the eye of a storm. Of course she hadn’t. And although I didn’t feel an ounce of judgment radiating from her side of the car, I suddenly felt the need to justify why I’d left Mulder.

“He’s been struggling for a long time,” I began delicately. It would have been easier to tell Leyla about Mulder’s depression, but I didn’t want to violate his privacy. “Ever since we moved out to the country, he’s been attempting to find something to hold onto, some sort of purpose he can focus on. And every now and then, he’s been able to do that. Sometimes, he seems fine and everything is...well, everything isn’t completely fine because he spends all of his time trying to stay that way.” I stopped again, a lump forming in my throat as I thought about how much effort it must have taken him to try to keep the depression at bay as long as possible, not only for his sake but also for mine.

After a few moments, Leyla asked softly, “And the other times?”

“I thought I was doing the right thing by allowing him the space to explore his pursuits,” I replied softly. “I knew his work was essential to him and something that could at least temporarily make things better for longer stretches. So I guess I figured if I wasn’t there holding him back, he’d have more freedom to pursue that work. But…” I could feel a thousand tiny pinpricks forming behind my eyes. “But after I left, he stopped doing anything at all,” I finally said, feeling the weight of everything left unsaid settle over me. 

Leyla ran her hand through her hair and said, “I don’t want to be presumptuous, but Agent Mulder is…he’s more than what he does on a daily basis. His life’s work, his quest for justice and truth, is bigger than that. I know he’ll find his way once more and keep going because this is too important. He just needs to discover the right catalyst. So even if it seems like he’s momentarily pushed the pause button, I don’t believe he’d ever truly stop. You know that too, Dana. It’s what makes him who he is.”

Listening to Leyla speak with an air of both certainty and devotion, an image flashed in my mind of a much younger Mulder standing in the middle of a road, in the middle of a rainstorm, with conviction on his face and passion in his voice. Standing opposite of him, that was the moment I knew that even if I was in over my head, even if I didn’t quite understand what I was getting myself into, the spark I saw in his eyes was enough to convince me that this was a journey worth taking. A fight worth fighting.  

This, I realized, was why I’d initially decided to pick up the phone to call Leyla. Subconsciously, I must have known I needed to talk to someone who understood Mulder, who saw him in their mind’s eye as the person he really was. I wanted to believe that her Mulder— _my_ Mulder—still existed. I wanted so badly to believe that he wasn’t lost forever.

“Thank you,” I managed.

She reached over and squeezed my arm gently. Then, after a moment, she asked, “Have you thought about talking to someone about this?”  

“I probably should,” I acquiesced. This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about seeing a professional, but I could never seem to find time in my schedule.

“Like, for instance, maybe you could speak to AD Skinner,” she suggested.

I barked out a laugh in surprise. Most people would have recommended a psychiatrist in this moment; only Leyla would think of an assistant director at the FBI. “I haven’t seen Skinner in years,” I admitted.

She hesitated and then said, “I have to go back to Headquarters to finish a few things. I was going to drop you off first, but maybe you’d like to come with me. You could see if he’s available.”

“Right now?” I asked incredulously.

“Why not?” Leyla said as we approached the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “He’d be thrilled to see you.”

I had no idea why she was even suggesting this. There was no way I could just show up unannounced and ask to see Skinner…was there?

 “You’ve already visited Quantico today; you might as well continue the rest of the tour,” she pressed.

“Leyla, I can’t—”

“You can,” she countered as she swung the car into the federal employee parking garage.

As we walked in the front entrance and Leyla talked to a security guard who directed us to the receptionist, I told myself he was not going to be here, that he would be on vacation or sick or just too busy to see me. But once Skinner heard who was waiting for him in the lobby, he informed the receptionist he would immediately come down himself to greet me.

Leyla left me standing there under the assurance that we’d meet back up at the entrance in a half hour. A few moments later, Walter Skinner strode towards me across the large lobby looking impossibly ageless. “Dana,” he said warmly, pulling me into a hug,” it’s been a really long time. It’s so good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too,” I responded with a smile.

“What brings you here today?” he asked, leading the way to the elevators.

“I met with Agent Harrison, and she suggested that I should stop by to see you.”

He regarded me closely across the cramped space of the ascending elevator, and I cast my eyes downward, flinching from his gaze. I wanted to add that I would have visited him on my own eventually, but he would have instantly seen through that. Mulder and I had withdrawn from the rest of the world, first from necessity and then from habit, finding refuge in the farmhouse much as we once had in our basement office. Then after I moved out, I’d turned even more inward, allowing my heartache to take on a life of its own, to weave itself into the curtains I’d drawn so tightly around myself that nothing could enter or escape.

Once he opened the door to his office, he motioned me in first. Without discussion, Skinner sat behind his desk while I situated myself in a chair that faced him, positions that we’d taken a thousand times before. Neither of us spoke for several moments while we stared at each other, wordlessly acknowledging how familiar this was, how weird it was.

He eventually broke the silence with something easy. “How have you been? How’s work?”

“Things having been going pretty well at the hospital,” I said, relaxing slightly. “I’ve been really busy lately, but I feel good about everything my surgical team has been accomplishing.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Skinner replied. “As for me, everything has been pretty much the same here.” He flashed a grin at me. “Even a bit boring since I don’t have too many rogue agents to wrangle these days.”

“I’m sure,” I murmured.

“So how is Mulder?” he asked after a few beats of silence.

I opened my mouth to say something generic that would smooth things over, but whatever truth serum I’d swallowed that made me open up to Leyla was apparently still in effect.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I haven’t talked to him in a while.”

He didn’t look very surprised at the news, and I wondered for a split second if he’d been keeping tabs on us through the years. Then again, it was more likely that he’d been able to guess our relationship status when I showed up here by myself.

“I’ve thought a lot about calling him over the years,” Skinner admitted. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I guess I thought maybe both of you wanted to put all of this…” he vaguely waved at the air around him “…behind you and move on with your lives.”

“That’s what I assumed we’d do,” I replied. “And for a while, I thought we could. But he needed more than that,” I said, the words tumbling from my lips easier now that I’d professed them once already. “He can’t leave it alone, his search for the truth, especially when he senses there’s something going on. I don’t know whether he’s actually onto something or if it’s just his general suspicions or what. I’m not even sure if he can tell the difference anymore. He tried for a long time to find answers on his own, but everything just led to one dead end after another.” I drew in a shuddery breath. “And now he’s…not sure what to do next,” I finished.

He reached his hand across the desk, ostensibly to touch mine in reassurance, but pulled it back awkwardly once he realized he was too far away. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

“I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can do,” I said despondently.

Skinner cleared his throat. “Well, ah, maybe I could talk to some of my colleagues and see if there’s anything available. I can’t promise anything, but I might be able to find something.”

I stared at him uncomprehendingly for several seconds and then felt my cheeks grow warm as I slowly realized that he thought he’d figured out why I was here. Shifting uneasily in my seat, I tried to think of a way to rescue this meeting so I didn’t sound like some desperate mother attempting to get her teenage son a job, any job, so he wouldn’t sit at home playing video games all day.

“It’s kind of you, but Mulder doesn’t want…he doesn’t need…”

Skinner’s eyes bored into my own. “You just said that he can’t find what he’s looking for on his own. Didn’t he originally join the FBI to search for answers?”

“Yes, but…”

“It seems logical that if he’s still searching, this might be a good place for him to continue.” Skinner shrugged. “He was always one of our best, even if his methods were a bit unconventional.”

I assumed there was no going back for Mulder, not after all of the bridges that had been burned at both ends. But…what if it were possible? With Leyla’s vision of Mulder still etched in my mind, I briefly allowed myself to imagine that against all odds, he was rehired by the FBI in whatever capacity they needed. Well, maybe not _any_ capacity; I knew Mulder would never agree to a desk job. But perhaps if he were able to go back into the field, it would rekindle that sense of purpose he was after. So many things would have had to fall perfectly into place for that to happen, though. Too many things.  

“You really don’t have to do this,” I assured him.

“I want to try,” he insisted stubbornly. “I’ve been worried about him, too.”

“I don’t want you to feel as if you…”

He cut me off and said gruffly, “I care about him, Dana. About you both.”

I stared at a point on the wall above his head, trying to control the tears that burned behind my eyes. I shouldn’t have been surprised that after all this time, Skinner’s first impulse was to help us, especially when I thought back to the last time I’d seen him. I’d been frantically trying to find and save Mulder, and Skinner hadn’t hesitated to come aboard when I called. He’d always had our backs.

“I know,” I answered softly.

Once I composed myself, I moved to leave, knowing Leyla would be looking for me. Skinner stood too and asked if I wanted him to walk me downstairs. I shook my head, and he came around from behind the desk to hug me once more.

“I’ll be in touch,” he promised once we broke apart.

Nodding weakly in response, I left the room quickly, feeling Skinner’s gaze on my back. I couldn’t picture Mulder’s reaction to finding out that I’d basically walked into our old boss’s office on a whim and managed to wheedle a job out of him. I decided that if by some twist of fate Mulder actually wound up working here again, I would have to find a way to gloss over that part. He didn’t really need to know all the details of what had to be the strangest day I’d had in a very long time, did he?

That question was still on my mind as I made my way back down to the lobby where Leyla was waiting.

“How did it go?” she asked as we stepped out into the cool autumn air.

“I think…I think Skinner wants Mulder to come back to work,” I said, the words even more unbelievable once I said them out loud.

“Why wouldn’t he? That’s great news!” She grinned happily but something she saw on my face made her stop short. Biting her lip, she asked, “Isn’t this what you want?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with me,” I answered swiftly.

Leyla nodded slowly. “But do you think it would be a good fit for Agent Mulder?”

I took a moment to consider the question. “In a way, the FBI might be good for him,” I conceded. “Back in the day, he constantly tried to test its limits, but ultimately he always had to find a way to work within the confines of the bureaucracy.”

“We need people who test the limits,” Leyla pointed out. “Otherwise, we’d just be a bunch of mindless drones.”

“That’s true, however…” I searched for a way to explain it to her. “I know you think it’s a good quality that Mulder refuses to give up until he gets his answers. And yes, for the most part it’s served him well over the years. But the darker side is that he’s drawn to his pursuits in the way that an insect is to those…those electrical traps.”

“Bug zappers?” she supplied.

“Yes, you know how the light attracts the insects, luring them in until they’re too close to the electricity? By the time they realize how dangerous it is, it’s too late to turn back. That’s how it is with Mulder: when he becomes fixated on a project, he can’t always tell how far is too far. He needs something that will pull him back if he wanders too close to the edge, something that will force him to keep at least one foot on the ground.”

Leyla looked sideways at me. “Do you really think it was the Bureau that did that for him for all those years?”

I cringed inwardly, knowing she had a point. I probably did have an obligation to him, as it was mostly my fault that he was currently spiraling evermore downward, adrift with no direction. I knew that if Mulder were somehow invited back to the FBI, he couldn’t do it alone. He’d told me that his whole life was about me, and at the time I’d thought it was sweet, the sort of thing that most lovers might say to each other. For him, however, it was one of his absolute truths.

But even though the guilt at leaving Mulder still throbbed through me like a full body migraine, I couldn’t fathom the idea of going back and trying to do this again. It was a familiar feeling, the perennial tug-o-war between what Mulder needed and what I was able to give. I just couldn’t imagine stepping back into that world, chasing after Mulder while he chased after aliens. Not to mention that if everything we’d tried thus far didn’t work, I doubted a reboot at the Bureau would magically fix things either.

To be fair, as I followed Leyla to her car, I had to acknowledge how the sensation of the gun, cool and heavy in my hands, had felt so natural, how my body had so readily remembered what my mind had tried to forget. But a scalpel also felt just as natural, and most people would agree that healing children was a better occupation than killing monsters. I also recalled our trip to Atlanta, how it had almost felt like a field assignment, each of us in search of our own truths but coming back together when it mattered. However, that trip had ultimately been built on secrets and half-truths on both of our parts, and it had left a sour taste in my mouth.

I sighed and looked over at Leyla as I climbed into her car. Even though she smiled encouragingly in response, my insides still twisted painfully. No matter what she wanted to believe, I couldn’t see how it was possible for Mulder and me to start over, or even try to pick up where we left off. No, the only reason I would ever consider doing that was simply out of a sense of responsibility, and I wasn’t quite sure that was a good enough one. If it by some chance this actually happened, I just hoped Mulder wouldn’t be too disappointed when everything wasn’t exactly as it had been before. After all, it was probably true what they said: you could never really go home again.


	21. Chapter 21

November 2015

 

At first, I assumed the sound of a car rumbling up the driveway was part of my dreamless sleep until a car door slammed shut and jerked me the rest of the way back to reality. What time was it? Who would bother me at this hour? With a groan, I twisted my body toward the clock on the end table and rubbed my bleary eyes until the electric green numbers sharpened into focus: 11:21. _AM_ , I added mentally, squinting at the sunlight streaming through the cracks in the curtains.

“Go away, Alvin,” I grumbled as I pulled an afghan over my head.

My neighbor, Alvin McIroy, the same guy who’d taken me on a chicken run into the city, had begun stopping by a couple times a week to make sure everything was running smoothly, as he put it. Just a few days ago, he’d shown up to perform routine maintenance on my water heater and then mentioned something about coming back to take care of my grub problem. Not that I’d known I had a grub problem. I’d been trying to remain civil because he was an older guy and probably lonely, but this was getting ridiculous.

I heard thumps up the porch stairs and then a knock on the door, but I stayed quiet, hoping Alvin or whoever it was would get the hint. Just as I started to relax, though, the door rattled again, this time followed by a twist of the doorknob against the deadbolt.

“See? Nobody’s home,” I muttered under my breath.

The knocking stopped so I listened for signs of my visitor giving up and leaving, but nothing happened. After a silent standoff that lasted a full two minutes, there came a series of stubborn thumps. Sighing in defeat, I hauled myself to my feet and stumbled towards the door.

“I happen to like my grubs right where they—”

My words died away as I opened the door to find Margaret Scully on the porch, balancing a stack of Tupperware dishes in one arm, the other still poised in the air mid-knock.

“Hello, Fox,” she said warmly.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry for dropping by unannounced, I just…”

She held up the plastic containers in place of an explanation, and I noted they were full of food. Some part of my brain recalled that yesterday had been Thanksgiving and this must have been the leftovers.

“Oh.”

“And I also came over to…because I wanted to…”

“Make sure I’m okay,” I finished for her.

I imagined what I must have looked like through her eyes, like I’d just rolled out of bed, or more accurately, off a couch. Running a hand through my unwashed and unruly hair, I sent a silent prayer of gratitude to Margaret’s sweet baby Jesus that I happened to be wearing a shirt. Pants, too, come to think of it.

Instead of responding directly, she asked, “May I come in?”

I pushed the door open wider and stepped aside. She breezed past me into the kitchen and immediately began putting everything away in the refrigerator while I trailed behind more slowly, still bewildered by her presence. It had been ages since she’d last visited, and she’d never been here without Scully.

Once finished, she straightened up and turned towards me. “How have you been?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

Margaret shot me a familiar “don’t bullshit me” look and sat down at the table, sliding a pile of books and papers aside while motioning for me to sit across from her.

“Considerably worse now that I know your daughter sent you to check up on me,” I amended, dutifully sitting down.

“It’s not like that,” she said swiftly. “I wanted to come.”

“But my name obviously came up around the table during your Thanksgiving meal.”

“Well, it wasn’t a very large party,” she responded, keeping her tone light. “Dinner for two.”

I pictured the two of them sitting at one end of Margaret’s long table: a huge spread of seventeen side dishes and a huge turkey in the center. The Scullys took holidays seriously, no matter what. But if she expected me to feel sorry about their lonely dinner, well, nobody had given me a chance to decline an invitation. Plus, it still beat my own dinner for one. Had I even eaten anything last night? My stomach answered in the negative so loudly that Margaret rose out of her chair and opened the fridge to retrieve the containers she’d just put away.

As she stood at the counter and spooned food onto a plate, she went on, “But, yes, Dana mentioned you last night. She feels…she says you won’t return her calls.”

I shrugged even though she wasn’t looking. “They say we’re becoming too dependent on our electronics, so I decided to unplug. Think of it as stopping to smell the roses.”

She whirled around, exasperation evident on her face. “Fox,” she began but then fell silent, her attention caught by something that caused her forehead to crease.

I followed her gaze over to a pile of kindling near the back door that, despite my best efforts, still somewhat resembled a kitchen chair. I’d meant to get rid of those broken pieces, but somewhere along the way they’d been swept away into a corner and forgotten. Margaret glanced over to the table where the fourth chair should have been, studying it carefully as if empty space could tell her something about my state of mind. After a few moments, she lifted her eyes to silently question me, but I simply returned her stare with a carefully neutral expression until she looked away and turned back to the counter.

“She just wants to reach out to you,” she said, her voice full of new concern.

Leaning back in my chair and attempting to sound disinterested, I replied, “You can report back to her that she’s free to stop by any time. She’s even got her own key.” Unless she’d decided to throw that away, too.

“This hasn’t been easy for her either,” Margaret said, expertly finding the right combination of buttons to start up the ancient microwave. “She’s trying to figure out how the two of you can—”

“How we can…what?” I interrupted. “Become the sort of polite acquaintances who get together for lunch but realize there’s nothing to say because they don’t even speak the same language?” I asked before I could stop myself. “Turn into the kind of exes who look at each other and wonder how it ever lasted as long as it did because evidently one of them had just been following the other for some unknown reason and just humoring them about…well, pretty much everything?”

Well, great. This was exactly why people weren’t supposed to be honest when asked how they were doing. Peering over to where Margaret stood, I tried to gauge her reaction to my outburst but she didn’t indicate she’d heard me as all, remaining silent and rigid at the counter as the seconds on the microwave ticked down.

“Do you honestly think,” she finally asked once she returned to the table, setting a pile of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing in front of me, “that Dana never cared about the work you two did?”

I shrugged noncommittedly, toying with my fork instead of looking at her.

She sat back down across from me and said, “I know a little something about following a partner as they fulfill their life’s work. Of course, I was lucky that our travels only took us to naval bases across the world; I know that for others, though, the journey isn’t always so straightforward.” She gave me a meaningful look. “But the thing about following someone else’s mission is…after a while, it becomes your own.”

I protested, “But that was…”

She held up one hand for silence and continued, “Even after you had to leave, after William was born, Dana never stopped working. They’d given her a teaching assignment, and that was all she was expected to do, but more often than not she’d find a reason to return to her old position. She was out there with the other agents, right alongside them, fighting for what she believed in. In fact, most of our arguments back then were because I wanted her give it up completely, but she refused.”

“I’m aware that she occasionally stepped in to lend her expertise to Doggett and Reyes.”

“Fox, you don’t call your mother in the middle of the night to watch your baby just because your colleagues could use an extra hand,” she replied witheringly. “Dana _wanted_ to do it. She chose to do it even if it wasn’t with you or for you. She wasn’t just humoring you and your cause; she believed in it too.”

“Yeah, well, she’s certainly doing her best to pretend it never happened,” I shot back.

“Too many things happened,” Margaret said, her voice softening again, “That was the problem. What they could have done to William, what they almost did to you…it took the fight out of her and caused her to turn her back on what she believed in. And since then, she’s striven to lead an ordinary life in order to keep the danger away from those she loves. She’s been willing to have a normal, pedestrian, and less eventful existence in exchange for safety.”

“I’m no expert, but the life of a pediatric surgeon doesn’t seem uneventful,” I muttered.

“I have to admit I was thrilled when Dana gave all of that up to practice medicine,” she conceded. “It was so hard to watch her running toward danger all of those years. I just never realized it would be worse to watch her run away from it.”

“But why is she running away?” I mumbled more to myself than to Margaret, yet she answered anyway.

“She doesn’t want to lose everything.”

“What’s there left to lose?” I asked bitterly.

Margaret eyed me for a moment. Then, as if she were reading a story, she intoned, “A man is standing on a remote cliff overlooking the nearby ocean, and when he looks down he sees a house near the water and realizes it’s on fire. He can see the smoke rising quickly, so it’s only a matter of time before the house burns to the ground. The man wants to help, and from his vantage point he sees it’s possible to put the fire out with ocean water, but it’s too steep for him to climb down. The quickest way to the house is to jump, but it’s a thirty-foot drop so the impact could kill him or at least hurt him so badly he wouldn’t be able to help. But if he tries to find a different way down or if he leaves to find help, he risks taking too long. What should he do?”

“Is this one of those ethics quizzes?” I asked skeptically.

“Not necessarily.”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “Okay, I get it. It’s an allegory, and I represent the house that’s going up in flames. Self-destructive tendencies and all that.”

Margaret regarded me closely. “No, you’re the person inside the house.”

I opened my mouth to complain that it was dishonest to change the parameters of a story after the fact, and it was also unfair to ask what someone should do without being upfront with all the possibilities. After all, people might answer differently if they were aware that somebody was trapped inside and on the verge of burning to death. I tried to tell her this, but all of a sudden, I couldn’t speak.

It could have been the heat from the air, from the fireplace, from the conversation itself, but my lungs constricted and my eyes stung. Was this some sort of an attack? I attempted to swallow again, blinking my eyes as rapidly as I could, and realized with gathering embarrassment that I was not, in fact, having a heart attack or even a panic attack. Still, it felt like some kind of assault as I fought back the sobs that threatened to erupt out of my throat.

“Fox,” I heard Margaret’s voice distantly as if I were underwater, “Look at me.” I focused on her eyes, two bright blue beams of light breaking through the fog. “Breathe,” she commanded and I inhaled sharply, over and over until the noose around my esophagus and mind released.

When I eventually felt the color return to my face, I cringed a little, expecting her to hover over me, all concerned after the incident, but “You should eat,” was all she said, nodding at the plate I hadn’t touched. I shoveled a forkful of turkey into my mouth and chewed violently, relieved at the distraction.

As she watched me eat, Margaret asked, “Do you believe in second chances?”

Scoffing, I answered, “Considering I’m pretty sure I’m on my fourth or fifth by now, why not.”

She shook her head slowly. “Second chances aren’t the same as miracles.” I kept eating as if I hadn’t heard her, and she added, “But we all get one just the same...and I think you're due for yours.”

That made me pause. “How do you know?” I whispered.

The corners of her mouth tilted up as she answered, “Call it the power of mother love.”

As quickly as the glimmer of possibility had crested, I felt it wash away again. Mother love sounded like nothing more than hoping for the best.

Margaret noted my body language with a smile and said, “You shouldn’t be so quick to discount it.”

“Yeah, well, whatever you may think, I don’t think Dana is going to give me a second chance any time soon,” I said, her given name on my tongue as foreign and flat to my ears as always.

“I never said she was going to give it to you,” she replied with a mysterious air. I raised my eyebrows at her quizzically, but she abruptly pushed back from the table and stood up. “I should probably get going.”

I walked her to her car and stood by while she got in. She rolled her window down and looked at me with affection. “Take care, Fox. And if you ever need any--”

“I’d jump,” I interrupted her with fierce conviction.

“I know,” she said gently. We looked at each other in silent understanding for a few moments until she rolled up her window. As started the car and backed down the driveway, I remained fixed in place, watching her drive away.

 

*****

  
I stared up at the ceiling in the inky blackness of the predawn night, tossing and turning Margaret's words around in my head: _second chance_. I didn’t even know why I was still thinking about something she’d only mentioned to make me stop sniveling like a child. The idea was absolutely ridiculous and besides, Margaret had also suggested that even if I got one it wouldn't come from Scully anyway, so what did it matter? For all I knew, that could have been her way of telling me Scully had moved on. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to force my mind to quit thinking, but it was futile. Eventually, I got up and decided to take care of something I should have done a long time ago.

Crouching in front of the fireplace, I carefully started a small fire with a match and some newspaper, watching the sheets slowly crumple and then ignite in a series of bright orange flashes of light. The pile of wood that used to be a kitchen chair lay beside me, and I picked up one of the jagged ends of a leg and held it over the flames for a few seconds until it caught.

The fire grew stronger as I fed it more pieces until it exploded into a luminescent inferno. Balancing on my heels while I watched the glowing embers engulf the wood, flickering and snapping, I found myself envying the kitchen chair: although broken and no longer able to function as intended, it was transformed into something useful in its last moments, fulfilling its final purpose in a blaze of triumph.

_Mulder, listen to me_

I stared hard at the burning wood, trying to figure out how I’d gotten here. I'd spent my life thinking that if I kept going, if I just kept moving forward, sooner or later everything would make sense. That a reason would emerge for all of this. But nothing had happened the way it was supposed to, and I wanted to be done trying to find answers or a purpose or a reason. I was so goddamned tired of everything, and I just wanted to find a way out.

_We can stop this thing right now_

But I still continued on despite the unending failure, despite the crushing exhaustion, despite the widespread disregard for my pursuits, because I didn’t have any other option. Even now I could feel the coils of anxiety wrapping around me at the mere thought of slowing down and letting the demons catch up. What they would do if they got ahold of me.

_Mulder, you don’t have to do this_

I’d told Margaret I’d jump, but that hadn’t always been true. There was always an exception to the rule, and my mother had been mine. I’d lost her the day we lost Samantha; she’d receded behind a brick wall of private anguish as if we couldn’t possibly share her pain. And so I had spent my young adult life fighting to find not only my sister but also my mother, in order to put my family back together. Through the years, I had existed only for that one goal even when it threatened to suffocate me. I guess you could say I’d tried to find a different way off the cliff that would save us all, but it hadn’t, so yeah, I knew a little bit about making a choice, making the wrong one, and realizing later that there were no good ones because the question was shitty and the whole scenario even shittier.

_Mulder, fight this. You can fight this_

Even after Samantha, after my mother finally collapsed into the black hole that had haunted the center of our lives, I’d kept going as fast as I could, kept searching, kept unraveling knots, kept trying to cast light into the darkness, anything to escape the gravitational pull she’d left behind in her wake. And I’d spent the rest of my life the same way: lurching from one disaster to the next while the flames that were always close at my heels urged me forward. But now I couldn’t even tell where I was headed; I couldn’t make out anything through the hazy smoke screen to catch a glimpse of my future. I was trapped here in this house and in this existence, suspended in limbo: unable to rest but too exhausted to move.

_You’re stronger than this_

A blast of smoke hit my face and I ducked my head, coughing, trying to catch my breath and to stop my heart from pounding. I shakily dragged a hand across my face and realized I was burning up. Defeat draped itself across my shoulders like an old familiar winter coat, weighty and oppressive. What good was strength when it just meant you were destined to bear burdens you couldn’t possibly carry forever?

_You and I can walk outside of this room_

Every bone inside my body felt like it was made of lead. Or maybe made of wood. I gazed into the fireplace, mesmerized, and wondered what it would feel like to be that chair: to feel the fire licking my toes and then feel it curling up around my calves, to burn with purpose and passion. Maybe it wasn't the worst thing in the world to let the fire catch me. I leaned forward on my toes and held my palms up experimentally, watching as the firelight danced through my fingertips. It was golden and warm and—  

_Mulder, no!_

I jerked my hands back and lost my balance in the process, sprawling backward on the floor as the vague phrases from some distant memory crystallized into something more material, something able to crash through the walls of my brain and wake me up. What the hell was I doing? Rubbing my hands against my thighs to cool them off, I realized just how close I’d come to the fire. I closed my eyes and was suddenly overwhelmed by a spasm of heartache, the same kind that had shot through me earlier after Margaret finished her story.  

My shoulders sagged and I slammed my fists in my eyes, trying to catch my breath, but it was more difficult this time on my own. Always before, whenever I’d fallen into trouble, those times I’d hit rock bottom, Scully had been here. Even if I’d found myself doubting everything else, I never doubted that she’d run towards me, towards danger, every time without a thought for her own safety. I’d come to rely on her, to look to her when the rest of the world spiraled out of control. So why else would I have heard her voice just now? Didn’t that mean something?

My pulse quickened a bit before I could stop it, and I found myself doing it again: looking up through the window of my mind to try to find the only person I’d ever trusted. But she wasn’t there; I couldn’t picture her there at all because I knew in my heart that Margaret was right. Scully would have been here by now if she were going to return. She would have been up on that cliff if she were planning to do something.

That’s what I couldn’t understand: why she didn’t do something. Even if what Margaret said was true and Scully was scared, well, nobody was asking her to save the world. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d been fearless back in the day either. At the very least, it wasn’t an excuse to run away; that wasn’t even one of the options on the list. And maybe whatever she decided never would have worked out in the long run, maybe she would have made the wrong choice, but at least _try_. That was the thing—you didn’t give up. You just didn’t. Even if you were facing a barricade or a dead end or the edge of a fucking cliff, you kept going.

Clenching my jaw, I flung another piece of wood into the fireplace as hard as I could. Sparks flew everywhere and I quickly brushed away a few that landed on my clothes, watching as they harmlessly flickered out. Apparently, it wasn’t that easy to catch fire after all. That meant the whole premise of Margaret’s story was pretty much horseshit, wasn’t it? I leaned back on my heels and idly plucked at my shirt for a few moments, thinking.

If the house was still standing, and if there was still enough time for a person on the cliff to make a decision, didn’t that mean there should also be at least a few seconds for the person inside to find a way out? I turned this new idea over in my head a few times. What was that person doing inside the house, anyway, apart from sitting on their ass and waiting for someone else to figure out what to do? I tried to remember if Margaret had ever actually mentioned if the person inside was trapped. At any rate, doors and windows didn’t lock from the inside, so as long as the person was still conscious, there were options.

My anger drained away as I realized I’d found the answer. I stood up quickly and felt a thrill shoot through me, the kind a child who had just solved a difficult math problem might experience, and had the sudden urge to tell Margaret that I’d done it. I’d figured out the key to her ethics quiz or parable or whatever she wanted to call it. It was the perfect solution, with no need for the person on the cliff to even so much as get their hands dirty.

I darted into the kitchen, pulling out drawers and opening cabinet doors in vain. Next, I ran upstairs, flipped the lamp on, and searched my nightstand unsuccessfully. Finally, I peeked into the storage closet before I remembered where I’d most likely put my phone.

Bounding back down the stairs with a burst of energy I hadn’t experienced in months, I flew into my office and made a beeline for the small garbage can next to the desk, the one I thankfully almost never got around to emptying. As I fished out my phone, I noticed the charger right underneath, so I immediately plugged in both and watched as the screen came to life.

But now that I was holding my phone, ready to make the call, the implications of solving the puzzle crashed over me. I sat down heavily at my desk as I realized what Margaret had been trying to tell me all along.

The voice I’d heard, the one trying to reason with me as I sat in front of the fireplace…it might have been Scully’s voice, even her words, but it was me. It had been me all along, only I’d suppressed that part of myself to make room for the demons that I’d believed had been helping me become productive and find my answers. I’d believed my pain was the catalyst so I kept it, held on to it, nurtured it, afraid to let it go and thus lose the drive to find answers.

However, now I realized I’d become dependent on my pain, letting it drive me instead of the other way around, propelling me along as if it were some kind of fuel. I’d falsely assumed that if I didn’t have something pushing me, I’d give up. I hadn’t realized that in the process, my sense of self and purpose had been whittled away over time until only fear kept me going rather than the genuine search for truth.

Now I saw that everything I’d accomplished since William, since Samantha, maybe since the beginning, had been despite my demons, not because of them, and if I could let them go, then maybe, just maybe…I could find a way out of the house and give myself a second chance.

Relief flooded through me, and I silently thanked Margaret for giving me the clues I’d needed. But how had she known what conclusion I’d draw from the story? And how had she known exactly what to say and how much to hold back? She’d set the whole thing up so perfectly, giving me just enough intrigue so I’d stick with it, mull the ideas over, and treat the whole thing like a riddle I had to solve. I shook my head in disbelief. Maybe there was something to her theory of mother love in spite of it all.

I picked up my phone again and started to search for her name, but I realized I had to follow through on my discovery first before I lost momentum. With renewed purpose, I punched a few different phrases into the internet’s search engine until I found what I was looking for and then dialed the number to a doctor’s office. For once, though, a pediatric surgeon was not on my mind. As I waited to be connected to an after-hours receptionist, I felt a new sensation growing in my stomach, a strange feeling that at first I couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t until I ended the call that I finally understood what I was feeling: hope.


	22. Chapter 22

“In the kitchen,” my mother called out in response to my greeting from the doorway.

 Her house had been completely transformed: red and green lights twinkling in all of the windows, stockings and holly on the fireplace mantel, a sprawling Victorian Christmas village on display under the bay window, poinsettia on the coffee table, and an enormous tree adorned with at least a hundred mismatched and homemade ornaments from throughout the years. The whole place felt warm and welcoming, just as it had everywhere we’d lived on every Christmas Eve I could remember.

I added the presents I’d brought to the already large pile and followed the warm smells of Christmas spices into the kitchen. Mom, busy at the counter with her cheeks and arms streaked with flour, looked up with a smile when I entered.

“Dana, hello,” she said warmly, gathering me into a tight hug. “Would you mind frosting the gingerbread men?" She nodded to the rows of faceless little brown men on cooling racks. "Dinner’s almost ready, but I need to get this mince pie going.”

“Gingerbread men _and_ mince pie?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “Very traditional.”

“I’ve got a yule log in the refrigerator, too,” she admitted. “I might have gone a bit overboard.”

“Just a bit,” I agreed with a grin as I tied an apron around my waist.

We worked side by side in comfortable silence for a few minutes until my mom asked, “So, how have you been?”

“Pretty good,” I replied. “The chief of surgery won that huge microtia grant I told you about, so we’ve been rushing to finish establishing our baselines for the trials.”

“Ah,” she said lightly, “that’s why we’ve only been able to communicate through voicemail for the last several weeks.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, making a mental note to add “Call Mom once a week” to my list of New Year’s resolutions. “I meant to get back with you."

“No, it’s fine,” she waved me off. “I’m just glad you’re here now.” She reached over to brush a strand of hair out of my face with a wistful glance.

Something in her tone made me look more closely at her, and I found myself wondering when her hair had thinned so much, when the lines had deepened in her face. “Mom, are you okay?”

“Yes, I'm just..." She gave a small laugh and looked down. “I just can’t quite seem to shake this feeling I had earlier. While I was setting up the Christmas village, all the Victorian houses reminded me of _A Christmas Carol_. You know, Dickens?"

"Of course," I murmured with a nod.

"This sounds silly, but all of a sudden I wanted more than anything else to be visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. To be able to go back and see one of those old Christmases with all you kids, and your father..." Her voice caught and she cleared her throat. "Well, like I said, it was just a silly thought.”

She blinked her eyes rapidly and pretended to concentrate on the pie in front of her. On impulse, I touched the edge of her sleeve at her elbow and thought back to that last Christmas with my father. When he'd died shortly after, I’d been too wrapped up in my own sorrow to really comprehend anyone else’s, especially not my mother's. I hadn’t experienced personal tragedy until I was almost thirty, and the grief had slammed into me with the force of a tidal wave, dredging up every doubt I’d ever experienced, especially regarding my career choices.

“I’ve wished so many times that he could..." _see I finally became a surgeon,_ I meant to say. But the words stuck in my throat as I thought back to the person I'd been then: a young woman who'd loved her job at the FBI so much she'd risked disappointing the person she adored most in the world. In fact, so clearly could I still see the sadness in my father's eyes, the dismay etched in his expression, that it took me a few seconds to realize I wasn't recalling a memory at all but the dream I'd had a couple years ago of a storm on the sea, and my father watching me from a boat as I struggled to keep my head above water.

“...that he could be here with us on Christmas,” I finished instead. 

My mother nodded in acknowledgement, and then after several long beats said, “I went to see him.”

“At the dock?" I asked, thinking of the sea, of ashes floating over the waves.

“I wanted to talk to you…I visited Fox.”

My fist clenched around the pipette so tightly that a glob of frosting oozed out onto a gingerbread man, smudging its carefully crafted smile into a look of distress that likely matched my own. “You went to the house? Why—?”

“It was last month. I just wanted to give him some Thanksgiving leftovers,” she said, putting her hands up as if in a gesture of self-defense. “And I figured he could use some company, too.”

“You shouldn't have done that,” I murmured. “Mulder doesn’t like it when people show up unexpectedly to bother him.”

“Sometimes when people say they don’t want to be bothered, that’s precisely the time you should start bothering them,” she countered.

I bit the gingerbread man's head off; it was ruined anyway. As I chewed, I fought to quell the resentment that threatened to bubble over, knowing it was unfair to get annoyed with my mother for doing something I should have done myself. Just like I should have invited Mulder to dinner tonight, even though he'd only been to exactly three Scully family Christmases. I wondered what he was doing at this moment, and I briefly closed my eyes, my mind traveling across the miles that separated us, almost as if the Ghost of Christmas Present were prodding me forward to peer through the window of the house we'd once shared. But although I could vividly picture the walls, the decor and the furniture, I couldn't seem to imagine what Mulder might be doing.

Attempting to keep my voice steady, I asked, “How was he?”

“He seemed…okay. Especially after I gave him reason to believe there might be some unfinished business he needs to address.”

“Mom…I didn’t tell you about my meeting with Skinner so you could run straight to Mulder about it," I said with a sigh. "It's such a longshot and besides, that was two months ago and I haven’t heard anything back. I’m sure nothing will come of it.”

My mother waved a hand away dismissively. “Don’t worry, I was very vague. I just let him know there were possibilities for something on the horizon. There’s no way he could have known what I meant. But I did see a spark of interest in his eyes when I mentioned it.” She hesitated and then said, “I saw something similar in yours when you told me about it, too.”

“One day with Mulder and you’re convinced I should run off to investigate crop circles with him?”

“Of course not,” she said with a smile. "Like you said, you're very busy. And it's always good to stay busy," she said ruefully, glancing around her with the same look on her face as when she'd mentioned my father.

I'd never thought about her life on a day-to-day basis before, not just as my mother but as a woman who had lost her husband twenty-two years before. She must have been lonely, but she’d never said a word, and I had never asked. In fact, I’d never really given a lot of thought as to what it must have been like for her to expect to grow old with someone, to count on someone as a life partner, and then to have it all taken away in an instant. Did that sort of heartache become more or less acute as the years went by?

"I should have done things differently," I acknowledged quietly.

She focused on putting the pie into the oven for so long that I wondered if she’d heard me. Finally, as she straightened up, she said, "Depression affects everyone around it, you know. Not just the person who has it."

"But I still...I should have..." I broke off helplessly.

"Dana, if we know enough not to blame people with depression for trying to escape from their pain, how can we blame those around them for wanting to run away from it too?"

But Mulder couldn't escape as easily. He couldn't just walk out of the house to get away from it like I had. "I should be facing this with him," I whispered.

"You never would have known what you wanted if you hadn't left. You always would have wondered."

While I appreciated my mother’s attempt to assuage my guilt, she must have known by now that it wouldn't dissolve as easily as communion bread. Part of me, I had to acknowledge, didn’t want it to. Without my sense of responsibility to Mulder, what other connection did we still have?

"Merry Christmas!"

My mom and I both jumped a bit at the exclamation and turned to face my sister-in-law, Tara. She was a blonde tornado of a woman, and as she rushed into the room to greet us, it was as if someone had turned on all the lights or opened the windows.

"It's so good to see you, Maggie," she said as she gave my mother a hug. "Sorry we're late; our flight was delayed a few hours."

"No, you're fine. Dinner isn't quite finished yet, so you're right on time," said my mother, beaming with pleasure.

Tara turned to me with a huge smile and clasped me so tightly my ribs protested. "I'm so glad you're here, Dana. It's been too long," she said. I murmured my assent; it had been a few years since I'd seen them.

"I'm just glad you could make it out here for Christmas," said my mom as she took food out of the oven. "I can't remember the last time you were here for the holidays."

"Yes, it was just so perfect that we were able to schedule Matthew's Blue and Gold Officer interview this week, which pretty much guaranteed approval for Bill’s leave request."

"So it’s official?" asked my mom. "He'll be at the Naval Academy this fall?"

"Well, it's not quite a done deal yet," Tara replied. "Matthew has until January 31st to complete his application, but this interview is a big part of the process, too. Bill has been on him to complete the written part, but you know how kids are," she said lightly. "Admissions are on a rolling basis, but we're not too worried about him getting in, of course, given his legacy. If all goes as expected, we'll be stateside again in just a couple months for the campus meet and greet."

The two of them continued chatting about Annapolis while I tuned them out and finished up the cookies. Theirs was a world I could only marginally understand, not ever having been a navy wife or mom; it wasn't quite the same as being a brat. I wasn't surprised to hear that Matthew would be continuing the Scully tradition of becoming a naval officer, though. How much of that decision was nature and how much was nurture? Could experiences and legacies become somehow so ingrained that they could be passed down like genes? Before I could stop myself, I thought of William, of what he might one day become. Was he drawn to the ocean the way we all were? Did he dream of gigantic ships without understanding why?

Once I finished frosting the last of the cookies, Tara and I began setting the table while my mother carried the food out. My eyes were drawn to a giant wreath with four candles in the middle of it: an Advent wreath. Evergreen wreaths supposedly symbolized the promise of eternity, a circle without beginning or end. Personally, though, I didn't see how an afterlife set on an endless loop would seem appealing to anybody.

Since my mind was already fixated on traditions and symbolism, I idly tried to remember what the three purple candles and the single white one represented beyond just marking the passage of time. The four gospels, maybe? But why would one candle be white? They could have represented the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but one candle was left over.

Thinking of ghosts again, specifically the Dickens kind, thanks to my mom, I imagined the candles representing the past, present, and future, but that still left the question of the fourth. But then I remembered Scrooge had been visited by four ghosts, including his business partner, Marley. Three visions but four ghosts.

It was the opposite of my situation, in a way. I'd had four visions but only three ghosts. Was I missing my own Marley, the one who was supposed to explain what it all meant? Not that there was any real connection here between my dreams and Christmas stories, of course. I hadn't even thought of ghosts when I'd first had the dreams, so it didn't make any sense to make that association now. But then again, Dickens would have argued that ghosts had a way of finding you at Christmas whether you were looking for them or not, and I knew a certain someone who would have agreed with that. Scoffing to myself, I picked up the book of matches next to the wreath and lit each of the three purple candles before hesitating over the white one.

"You don't light that one yet," said Tara as she walked in with a bowl of mashed potatoes. I looked up at her and she continued, "Lighting the white candle signifies that Christmas has come."

I shrugged and blew out the match, saying to the white one wryly, "I guess that would make you the candle of Christmas Yet to Come."

Tara came over to me and we both stared at the flickering light for a moment before she said, “No, it’s the Lord Almighty.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not ‘Christmas is to come.’ The Bible verse says, 'The Lord Almighty who was, and is, and is to come.'"

"The Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and End, Amen," Bill intoned as he stomped into the dining room. "There's my little sister," he said with a grin, putting an arm around my shoulders and giving them a squeeze.

His coat was still cold, and he smelled like winter and aftershave when I said into his sleeve, “Merry Christmas, Bill.”

My mom came up behind us and threw her arms around him as soon as I let go. "It's so good to have you here.”

"It's good to finally be here. The luggage is finally unloaded and upstairs; you'd think we were staying a year instead of a week," he said, shaking his head. "I hope you don't mind, Mom, but I told Matthew he could put the angel on the tree this year. He doesn't want any help, but I told him if he's still out there in ten minutes or I hear a crash, all deals are off."

"Of course," said my mother with a smile. "We’ll eat in just a few minutes."

Once my mom returned to the kitchen, Bill turned to Tara, suddenly serious. "Since you’re quoting Revelation, does this mean you agree we should tell them what we’ve been learning?"

Tara shook her head. "No, we were just talking about the wreath," she said, nodding towards it. "I still don’t think Christmas is a good time for this, Bill.”

"It's happening now," Bill said, disregarding her argument and focusing his eyes intently on mine.

"What is?" I asked warily.

"Your brother is convinced that signs have shown us to be living in the end days and that we'll be visited by plagues and pestilence very soon," said Tara, rolling her eyes.

He shot her a look. "Tara says she's waiting for more evidence, so I’ve been trying to make her see everything going on around us and how everything is connected. Dana, you must have noticed how the global elites are building a socialist new world order, trying to seize all of our weapons. They're messing with our food by creating genetically modified crops, they're killing the honeybees, and they’re creating vaccines that poison us. When they shut off the municipal water supply, well...don't say I didn't warn you."

"You know, I never took you for a conspiracy theorist," I said with a smile. 

"He's been talking about this kind of thing for a couple years now, ever since he started watching Fox News," Tara replied, shaking her head. "But ever since he started watching this new internet show, he's been pretty insufferable with the apocalypse talk."

I'm just a patriot who’s concerned about his country," he protested. "Government's been taken over by deep state enemies, and every day we’re getting closer to the start of World War III. We need to prepare ourselves spiritually and physically for the coming onslaught.”

I couldn't help but snort. "You've become one of those doomsday preppers?"

"Laugh all you want," he said, scowling. "But you'll come crying to me when all of this comes to pass and I’m the only one who’s prepared. The end is upon us, and it will be here sooner than you can imagine."

His words made me think of Mulder, who'd also been convinced he knew when the world would end, but that date had passed almost exactly three years before. Recalling the verse that I'd looked up to mollify Mulder once it was clear he'd been wrong and nothing would change, I recited, "'But of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only.'”

Bill narrowed his eyes. "Catholic teaching says we should look for the signs for when and how it all begins. For instance, prophecy tells us of four living creatures that are supposed to see everything and will be the first to signal that it's started. If you want to start spouting Scripture, remember that Revelation 4:7 is clear in their description: ‘The living first creature was like a lion and the second was like a calf, the third had a face like that of a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle.’ The Bible wouldn't have given us these kinds of specifics if we aren't supposed to look for them, if we’re not supposed to piece the clues together," he argued.

"That must be some persuasive internet show for you to begin sounding like some bad evangelical preacher," I said with a smirk. "Do you expect these signs to fall out of the sky or something? One day, you’ll look up and see a lion, a calf, a man, and a flying eagle?"

But as soon as I repeated the words, a jolt of electricity flooded my body, not unlike the feeling I'd gotten in the lobby of my building the year before. My ears rang, my vision darkened, and everything seemed to rotate 90 degrees. _A man, a flying eagle, a lion, a calf_. What if the man happened to be on a boat while a storm raged? What if that monster with the wings, the one who refused to stop talking in my sister’s voice even when I shot it with my gun, had really been a flying eagle? And what if the lion was not really a lion but a picture etched into the lonely desert road where my daughter showed up? Finally, what if the young buffalo, the one who had turned to me on a mountaintop asking me to wake up, could also be called a calf? Did any of this mean anything? Were these dreams trying to tell me that the end of the world was still coming?

"But that's impossible," I muttered.

"Nothing's impossible, Aunt Dana," exclaimed Matthew, bounding into the dining room.

"These Millennials are so optimistic," said my mom, walking in and setting a basket of rolls on the table. She reached up and tousled her grandson’s hair fondly.

"For no good reason," grumbled Bill. "Mark my words," he said, nodding sharply at me, “the Antichrist has arrived and is already dividing people, already causing people to choose sides, just as it’s been foretold. This world is going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s pretty clear that everything is pointing to the Second Coming.”

I ignored my brother for a moment and wrapped an arm around Matthew’s slim waist as he towered over me as most teenage boys did. His sandy blond hair brushed my forehead as he bent to kiss my cheek, and I squeezed tighter, grateful that he’d always been a thoughtful and affectionate boy. Not that he was really a boy anymore; his eighteenth birthday was next week.

Once I reluctantly let go, Matthew took a deep breath and said, “We had a discussion about the end of the world in my IB literature class just a few weeks ago. My teacher said there are lots of people who want the peace effort in the Middle East to fail.” He shook his head. “They actually _want_ Armageddon to happen so Jesus will return. But most of us agreed that if Jesus will only come back after we’ve basically destroyed the world, why is that something to look forward to? Why wouldn’t we try to put off his arrival for as long as possible?”

“Because the true believers will be saved,” replied Bill confidently. “They’re the only ones who matter anyway.”

Tara shot him a look and said to Matthew, “Don’t forget that good will always prevail over evil, honey. That’s why we can look forward to Jesus because whatever happens, our true selves, our souls, are immortal.”

Perplexed, my mom asked, “Uh, what sort of literature are you reading in that class, Matthew?”

“William Yeats, a 20th century Irish poet,” he responded eagerly. “We read his poem, ‘The Second Coming,’ and discussed how some of the themes of feeling a loss of control over events of the world apply more than ever today.” He pulled out his phone, tapped a few keys, and read:

_Turning and turning in the widening gyre_  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer  
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned  
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

“That’s…powerful imagery,” my mom murmured.

“Yes, I love how we made connections between our time and what they must have been thinking and feeling back then,” said Matthew. “Yeats was concerned that people had lost faith in their corrupt leaders, so they looked forward to a savior, not realizing what such a wish would mean.”

“That school is filling your head with liberal nonsense, that’s what,” scoffed Bill. “We know exactly what the Second Coming will mean, but we also know it will be worth it in the end. After all, who was it who said, ‘the truth will set you free, but first it’s gonna kick your ass’?”

“Bill,” Tara said warningly.

“Butt,” he amended. “Besides, I thought we agreed that you were going to forget the literature stuff. Your STEM scores are too high to consider throwing it all away to become an English major at some artsy school.”

“I agreed to do the interview on Monday, didn’t I?” asked Matthew softly, looking at the ground.

“Yes, and you need to get going on that application, too, young man,” Bill said warningly.

“I said I’d do it, and I will.”

Father and son faced off, and the evergreen wreath on the table before us seemed more apt than ever as another Scully ritual played out on repeat like a snake chasing its tail. I could tell by the way Matthew didn’t meet Bill’s eyes, the way he bit his lip nervously, that this rebelliousness wasn’t an everyday occurrence. It had been simmering for a while, only now breaking the surface.

I knew all too well what it felt like to be torn between family obligation and personal fulfillment. I’d been lucky to have a sister who encouraged me to choose my own path, and I longed to do the same for my godson. _Go be an English major, if that’s what you want_ , I silently willed to him. _The world won’t end because you disappointed your father._ But I kept my mouth closed; it wasn’t my place to harbor hopes and dreams for a child who wasn’t my own.

Glancing at Tara and my mother, I noticed they were transfixed too, watching the exchange with a train-wreck-level of interest. I cleared my throat conspicuously and my mom snapped out of her daze. “All right, dinner’s ready,” she said firmly. “Let’s sit down and have a nice meal.”

We all dutifully sat down and said grace, which did nothing to ease the tension swelled around us. The silverware clinked loudly against the plates as we studiously ate, and from the corner of my eye, I saw my mom trying to silently plead with Tara and me to help. I glanced away, but Tara spoke up with forced enthusiasm.

“I think we should go around the table and share our Christmas wishes,” she proclaimed. “Maggie, isn’t that something you all used to do years ago? Everyone says something that they hope for in the coming year?”

I flinched at her words. How was it possible she didn’t know why we’d stopped? I studied Bill, but he looked at dumbfounded as I felt. True, nobody had come out and announced the end of it; the tradition had tacitly died when Melissa did. Looking down, I remembered my sister’s excitement, her belief in Christmas magic, her proclamation that anything was possible this time of year. I couldn’t remember exactly which year she’d come up with the idea, but it must have been while she was still a child because I pictured her so clearly with her hands on her hips, telling her brothers that they couldn’t just wish for more toys. More ghosts; the evening seemed full of them. 

My mother recovered first and said with a gracious smile, “That’s a lovely idea, Tara. Why don’t you go first?”

“I’m so happy that we were able to get some time off and visit family,” she said. “My Christmas wish is that we’ll have a reason to come back here very soon.”

Bill spoke up next, saying, “Christmas and family traditions are so important, and I wish for us to keep _all_ of them going into the future generations.”

Matthew avoided looking at his parents and said, “I wish for a world where there’s no more war ever again.”

“You know what they say: world peace will only happen when humanity is wiped out,” Bill remarked.

“Give it a rest, Bill,” my mom said wearily. “I wish that _all_ of my children and grandchildren find happiness and a sense of accomplishment in whatever they choose to do.” She nodded at Matthew who returned her look gratefully.

“Dana?” my mom prompted after a moment.

“I wish for female equality,” I muttered, knowing that it was the equivalent to saying “pass.”

But I knew all too well that it was best not to wish for anything and hope to keep it, especially at Christmas. A wish felt too much like a challenge to the universe, an invitation for the scariest ghost of the story to do its worst.

 

*****

 

A few weeks later, I was in the surgical anteroom, scrubbing up and mentally preparing for the next surgery on my schedule, that of a young boy. This wasn't a particularly difficult surgery, but it was the first of its kind I'd performed since we'd lost a little girl two years ago. Olivia.

The first thing my attending had told us new interns was that a surgeon's greatest asset was a selective memory. We had to continually remain in the present and wipe the slate clean each day: no dwelling on past mistakes, no resting on previous accomplishments. It was the only way we'd survive in this profession.

With its focus on the present moment, the meditation exercises I’d started doing had become first a useful and then an essential ritual I performed before surgery. Finding a focal point, I drew in a deep and steady breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. I would be fine; this surgery would be fine, as long as I took the time to center myself in these last few moments before they called me in. If I could finish my meditation exercises in full, then I—

"Excuse me, Dr. Scully?"

Dammit.

"Yes," I replied to the nurse without turning to look at her as I attempted to keep my focus.

"You have a phone call."

"I'm just heading into surgery,” I reminded her in a clipped tone.

"That's what I told him, but...but he said it was important."

My heart seized up in my throat as my thoughts zoomed in on the darkest scenarios possible: Mulder ill. Mulder hurt. Mulder dead. "Who is it?"

"He says his name is Walter Skinner. Assistant Director, FBI."

I waited a moment for my pulse to regulate. Mulder was presumably okay, at least for now. But this would be difficult too, in a different way.

"Scully," I said crisply into the receiver, trying to cover up my nerves.

"I'm sorry to bother you at work, but I need your answer on this quickly," Skinner began without preamble. "A man contacted me, looking for Mulder. He needs help in his, uh, area of expertise."

“Somehow I doubt we’re talking about behavioral sciences,” I said wryly, craning my neck to observe the other surgeons starting without me.

“He might have mentioned UFOs. Something about how he believes Roswell was a cover up,” Skinner admitted.

I exhaled noisily as I pinched the bridge of my nose. “A nut job decided to call the government to rant about government conspiracies?”

“Mulder still has a following,” he said defensively. “Over the years, I’ve fielded lots of calls from people asking for him. Usually I tell them to take a hike, but since your visit, I’ve been on the lookout for anything promising. In fact, just last month I turned down a woman who was convinced her son’s pet rat could interpret secret messages from the Chinese.”

“At least the rat might be useful.”

“And this guy isn’t exactly a nut job,” continued Skinner as if I hadn’t spoken. “True, he has some controversial ideas and seems completely paranoid, but his credibility checks out. He’s a breakout internet star with his own show: _The Truth Squad with Tad O’Malley_.”

“I suppose celebrity is what passes for credibility nowadays,” I muttered.

“Look, you came to me, remember? I’ve been trying to find him something he’d be willing to do that won’t also get my ass fired.”

“If it’s going to get you in trouble, just forget it,” I said. I decided not to remind him that I’d practically been forced into meeting with him, anyway.

Skinner sighed and his voice softened. “No, I want to help him; I told you that. But he’ll be operating outside of official jurisdiction while I work through the red tape, so to speak.”

“In other words, you want him to fly under the radar.” Not that I could blame him; if I were Skinner I wouldn’t have been brave enough to bring up Mulder’s name in a meeting, let alone add him back on the payroll.

“It won’t be like last time,” he promised. “If all goes well, I expect this can serve as a way to prove to the higher-ups that Mulder can still do good work for us.” He paused. “I am taking a risk, though. If it goes poorly, if something goes wrong, they’ll be able to tie everything back to me.”

“You want me on this too,” I said, realization setting in. Why else would we be having this conversation when Skinner could have just asked for Mulder’s number? “You need me to stop him from doing anything stupid.”

“Well…I wouldn’t put it that way. I’d just prefer if you could check in with him once in a while. I’m not asking you to take a leave of absence or anything—“

“The thought hadn’t crossed my mind…”

“—but before I go ahead on this, I would feel better if someone else with experience was involved with this as well.”

What a surprise to hear Skinner was wary of allowing Mulder and some crackpot to chase theories down rabbit holes by themselves. “Why do I see myself getting roped into a midnight UFO hunt?” I asked grimly.

“Don’t worry, this guy’s more than just UFOs. Actually, his show is more about all kinds of conspiracies and how they’re all connected to a coming apocalypse.”

This gave me pause, and I slid my laptop over to Google the name of the internet show. A video popped up and started playing, and what I saw surprised me. I’d been expecting some old guy with a long beard, ranting about the end of the world, but this guy, this Tad O’Malley, was younger, attractive even, and he seemed genuinely and passionately concerned with uncovering the truth. In fact, he reminded me a little of…

I hastily shut the laptop; this wasn’t helping.

“But like I was saying,” Skinner continued, “If all goes well and we can prove there’s some sort actual case in the midst of the conspiracies, this could lead to other things. Full reinstatement, maybe.” He let the words linger for a few seconds before he said, “The offer stands for you too, of course. I understand you have other responsibilities…”

“I’m busy,” I said abruptly.

As I said it, though, I thought back to my mother telling me it was good to stay busy, to learn how to fill up the hours as she’d been doing for the last twenty-two years. I’d always thought of my own situation as more temporary, but how long was I going to keep marking time before something happened? I realized I’d been expecting something to change on its own, but maybe that was exactly how decades of time slipped by: in mindless complacency.

My dreams, in contrast, had all been punctuated by a sense of urgency, a sense that I had to act in some way. Was this it? Was this what they had been pointing to? If I said yes to Skinner, would it set off a chain of events leading to the end of the world?

_Get a grip, Dana_.

The world’s fate obviously did not rest on any decisions I might make. What kind of ridiculous god complex was that? Just because my brother had quoted a few lines of Scripture that reminded me of a few dreams I’d once had didn’t mean the world was doomed. It didn’t mean there was actually a connection. It certainly didn’t mean I had an obligation to babysit for Skinner.

And yet I heard myself say, “But I suppose you can tell me more about what kind of help this guy wants from Mulder.”

“He didn’t provide a lot of details, wanted to save the specifics for Mulder. I guess he thought I was too ‘establishment’ or something,” Skinner replied with a chuckle. “Do you think Mulder will even agree to this? I know you said he wasn’t really into doing much these days.”

“If I know Mulder, he’d never pass up the chance to save the world.”

Although I’d said it jokingly, I realized I wasn’t too far off the mark. Mulder had always felt a responsibility to find the truth, not only his own personal truths but the big ones, too. He would always find worth in walking through hell if it drew him even one step closer to casting light into the darkness. He, more than anyone else, understood the danger but he would always move toward it, every time. It didn’t make sense to outsiders who wondered why he sought out the darkness, but it also didn’t make sense why Christians would eagerly look for the prophecies in Revelation to be fulfilled.

It hadn’t made sense to me, I knew that. I had thought Mulder was too focused on the past, constantly yearning for the glory days of the X-files because he stubbornly refused to do anything else. But maybe he’d recognized what loomed before us and was only willing to face it because he recognized there no other way around it for us. I, on the other hand, had spent the last fifteen years telling myself I was practicing medicine when in reality I’d been practicing avoidance, trying every which way I knew to avoid the reckoning I’d always feared was bearing down on us. Mulder had always understood that one day we’d have to confront everything we’d left behind, everything I’d tried so desperately to forget, and if I were honest with myself, I’d always known it too.

I’d attempted to hold off the inevitable for so long that these dreams had erupted out of my subconscious, reminding me of everything we’d left undone and unanswered. These messages, these people whom I loved, were urging me to do what I had refused for so long to even consider. All of which suggested to me that maybe this apocalypse wasn’t necessarily a world-destroying event but perhaps more of a personal metaphor. Like monsters in the dark. Like ghosts. 

“So, does that mean you’re in? I need an answer before I confirm with O’Malley.”

This was just another choice to make in my life, another decision that had the potential to change everything. Of course, I could choose to do nothing. I could hang up the phone, and walk into the operating room. Continue drifting along life with my eyes closed, pretending I could keep the darkness at bay forever. Close the door completely on Mulder and finally absolve myself of any guilt by finally casting him into the oubliette of my mind like so many extinguished memories. 

Or I could acknowledge what Mulder already figured out and what my unconscious mind had been screaming at me: that somehow, in ways I didn’t yet realize, agreeing to help on this case might in fact send us down a path towards our downfall, but perhaps we’d also manage to pull from the rubble some semblance of the truth we’d always sought.

“Scully? Are you still there?”

Skinner’s voice was full of concern but still I hesitated, the possibilities swirling around me. It would have made sense for me recall Melissa at this moment, since she’d always helped me make these kinds of choices before. But instead I returned once more to the sea, so abruptly I could taste the salt water, almost hear the growling thunder. 

_What do you want me to do, Ahab?_

But I’d always known what my father was trying to tell me. Even if there was no way to know whether Skinner’s offer would prove to be an anvil or a life preserver, I had to reach for it just the same. It was time to stop peering through the window of my life and start living it again. To quit treading water and start kicking forward instead. To wake up and set things in motion, wherever they led.

“Dana? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”


End file.
